Recently, the US EPA has sought expert advice regarding its future participation in the Global Earth Observation System (GEOS) initiative. A panel was convened in mid-March, and a report has been developed. Among a list of recommendations--which the authors describe in a companion paper in this conference--the panel suggests that EPA can assist the GEOS by providing expertise in operational air quality forecasting.

Toward this end, a second set of recommendations is being developed for EPA. These recommendations are drawing not only from the GEOS panel report but from other sources, including the US Weather Research Program Prospectus Development Team (PDT-11) meeting held in 2002, a follow-on USWRP meeting convening air quality forecasting expertise held in June of 2003,and the NOAA/EPA plan for operational air quality forecasting.

These recommendations are focusing on particular expertise that EPA has gained through its ability to monitor and quantify trace and criteria pollutants near the earth's surface, and ways these technologies can be used to enhance the observational and model data-assimilation needs of future numerical air quality prediction systems.

The background behind and summary of these recommendations will be discussed in this talk, along with their relation to the GOES effort.