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The addition of wildfire smoke forecasting capability to the High-Resolution Rapid Refresh model (HRRR-smoke) has been one of the great model implementation success stories at NOAA of the past several years. Not only are air quality predictions vital for their ability to inform advisories on impacts to human health, but the impact of smoke on meteorological fields can be significant, especially for large-scale and high-end wildfire events, and HRRR-smoke has shown marked benefits in both respects. As NOAA’s modeling efforts advance towards a Unified Forecasting System (UFS) under a shared software framework with the Finite Volume Cubed-Sphere (FV3) dynamical core, and eventually the Model for Prediction Across Scales (MPAS), there is a need for a quick and easy way to verify the predictions of novel prototypes for smoke prediction against real observations in order to not only replicate but improve upon the success seen with HRRR-smoke.In the Developmental Testbed Center (DTC) we have, over the past few years, introduced a robust framework of verification tasks in the UFS Short-Range Weather (SRW) Application based on the enhanced Model Evaluation Tools (METplus). These verification tasks can not only be used to verify output from the SRW against real-world observations, but can evaluate staged data from prototypes of the Rapid Refresh Forecast System (RRFS), the next generation UFS-based forecast system for realtime weather prediction in North America, comparing model output to observations, other forecasts/analyses, or both. In this presentation, we will describe the implementation of METplus-based verification of smoke-related air quality variables in the framework of the UFS SRW App. Furthermore, we will present the results achieved with this verification framework on RRFS prototypes with smoke output, as well as plans for future verification in the Unified Forecast System, both within SRW and across other UFS Applications.
| Period | Jan 13 2025 |
|---|---|
| Event title | 105th Annual American Meteorological Society Meeting |
| Event type | Conference |
| Location | New Orleans, United StatesShow on map |