Urbanized MM5 Modeling of NYC sea breezes for emergency response activities

The DHS NYC UDS study will improve the existing meso met, conduct field tracer studies, improve computer models to simulate urban-canyon dispersion patterns and, transfer the improved capabilities to NYC ER agencies. The Martilli-Dupont/EPA urbanization scheme in MM5 was used at SJSU (there called uMM5) with GIS/RS urban input fields from EPA and the University of Utah (UofU). SJSU worked with LLNL, NRL, and SUNY/SB to develop consistent domain boundaries for concurrent uMM5 and COAMPS. The uMM5 model was successfully run for the July 2004 NYC sea breeze frontal passage case simulated by all the groups. uMM5 successfully reproduced the observed sea breeze front life-cycle by use of five domains (36, 12, and 4, 1.3, 0.44 km grids), with the inner most grid using the uMM5 algorithms and urban GIS/RS inputs from LANL and UofU. Statistical comparisons of results from the simulations will use outputs from the concurrent SJSU, LLNL, NRL, and SUNY/SB runs.