What is the RAMS model and how is it used at ARL?
RAMS is no longer directly supported at NOAA ARL Headquarters,
however forecasts are still being produced for the Chesapeake
Bay Region, and ARL Line offices are producing forecasts
for various locations across the U.S.
RAMS is used to support air quality research. The utility
of using RAMS for real-time prediction of local-scale flows
and for detailed post-event analysis was examined for a
Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) exercise
at the Susquehanna nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania.
RAMS has also been evaluated for air pollution deposition
onto the Chesapeake using the buoy derived fluxed and deposition
velocities there.
Special software developed at ARL allows the user to
initialize RAMS anywhere in the world using customized
packed meteorological fields and global land and water
surface data sets. The ARL RAMS operational emergency response
forecasting system for air quality is described in more
detail in Draxler, et al. (1993) and McQueen, et al. (1995,1997).
RAMS was modified to be initialized from from NCEP model
fields (Eta, AVN, NGM, etc.) in ARL packed form. Many different
spatially varying surface variables such as soil moisture,
soil and vegetation type, canopy temperature and water
content, terrain height, land roughness, land percentage
and sea surface temperature (SST) are ingested into RAMS
on the model grid. Soil moisture is predicted by first
computing an Antecedent Precipitation Index (API, Chang
and Wetzel, 1991) derived from the last few months of observed
or model gridded precipitation archived at ARL. A four
dimensional data assimilation package, originally developed
at the Savannah River Lab, was added and evaluated in RAMS.
The RAMS turbulence parameterization has been modified
for air quality applications and deposition velocity of
HNO3 onto the Chesapeake Bay has been added. A driver has
also been added for the HY-SPLIT and
Urban Airshed and CAMX Model pollutant transport and dispersion
model.
RAMS is run operationally over the Chesapeake bay with
a finest mesh of 4 km over a 296 by 376 km domain and 26
vertical levels. For research applications, RAMS has been
run with 1 km grid spacings. RAMS has also been run and
evaluated for several air pollution and emergency response
exercises (e.g.: ETEX, NARE; FRMAC-93, 95, RSMC exercises).
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