Overarching Goal:
To make breakthrough advances in range- and urban-scale meteorology and modeling on all time scales along with coupled model applications such as plume-transport and dispersion for the purposes of providing operational forecasters, decision makers, and emergency managers with accurate guidance and life-saving capabilities.
Motivation
RAL’s research has the capability to fill science and technology gaps that exist in the U.S. national security space, including homeland security (protecting domestic assets and population from attacks), homeland defense (eliminating threats before they appear on US soil), and weather-sensitive missions of all forms within the Department of Defense. These needs are manifested at urban and neighborhood scales where decision makers fear that our greatest vulnerabilities lie (for example, from biological weapon attacks on our cities or airports). RAL is motivated to focus not only on a single scale of air motion, but on interactions at many scales, since the winds flowing down urban canyons and even pressure distributions on single buildings depend on properly resolving the meteorology at all scales.
Striving to accurately represent the weather from advanced modeling and data assimilation methods is only part of the mission, however; the crux is to not only produce such information in time frames suitable for decision makers, from mission planners to emergency responders, but to couple the meteorology to secondary applications models from which meaningful decision can be made. A full description of the atmosphere – even a perfect one – is useless to sponsors in the absence of tools that can translate the weather information into actions that support their missions. It is the proper coupling of the atmosphere to secondary applications such as transport and dispersion models, air-quality models, damage-prediction models, etc, that perhaps defines the most significant contribution that we can make to our sponsors. The complexity of this undertaking, and the limitations of the tools themselves, requires that one keenly focus on properly quantifying, calibrating, and using the uncertainty information that propagates from the observing platforms, the weather models, and the secondary applications.
While RAL has historically emphasized rapid-response time scales to support needs of military test ranges and emergency first-responders, there is increased motivation to focus on the longer time scales as well. Mesoscale climates and their temporal variability at small spatial scales are being explored, and RAL is beginning to investigate how these climate data sets can be used for long-range prediction. In addition, consideration of NCAR initiatives involving WRF-based regional climate modeling and regional water-cycle modeling are of great interest, in that they provide additional tools and areas of research that are likely to benefit sponsors’ needs for longer-term planning. The Army ranges would benefit from improved weather variability analysis and climate prediction, as would Army Intelligence. Naturally, the ability to demonstrate greater predictive skill than is currently available in the national inter-seasonal models would have tremendous potential to attract sponsor interest in research being addressed by a broad spectrum of NCAR and university researchers.
Strategic Approach
The program is currently focusing on the following areas:
- Urban meteorology
- Coupling urban-scale meteorology to transport and diffusion models, and developing other secondary applications for prediction of flooding, infrastructure damage, airdrop point of impact, sound propagation, and ballistic trajectories
- Developing and verifying general mesoscale models, data assimilation and ensemble capabilities
- Understanding boundary-layer structure and processes in a variety of geographic settings
- Studying long histories of weather variability at fine scales anywhere on the globe, and investigating larger scale influences such as teleconnections; also investigating potential opportunities from participating in the regional WRF initiative
- Model verification, targeted to the user
- Leveraging latest software and hardware technology to deliver information-rich weather and climate information to end users and decision makers
As R&D funding in the sciences continues to erode in light of other national priorities, sponsors seem to be focused more on deliverables and products, and less on furthering the basic research underlying them. In the DHS Science and Technology Directorate, for example, a key program manager recently declared that “atmospheric and transport and dispersion scientists have had plenty of time to develop and test their models. It’s time to put them to use in a way that will benefit decision makers directly.” A bit extreme, perhaps, but indicative of the mindset of some mission agencies and the challenges facing RAL in transferring technology with a solid scientific basis.
RAL will continue this work and will extend these capabilities in collaboration with its primary sponsors in the DOD, Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA), Defense Advanced Research Program Agency (DARPA), the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the 50 states, some international government agencies and the private sector. Numerical modeling and the integration of numerical models will continue to be a key theme in RAL’s work toward reaching this goal.
Sponsors mentioned above are gradually learning that the “devil is in the details” when it comes to designing state-of-the-science systems that can detect and predict the movement of hazardous material. As these groups demand more and more accuracy and detail in their systems, RAL’s development paradigm will increase in demand.
Advanced data assimilation techniques applied to new types of data will be very important to reaching this goal. One of RAL’s strategic approaches is to invest as much resource as possible into this area of research in order to reap the benefits in terms of enhanced numerical model capabilities.