Rapid Refresh with Chemistry

Real time forecasts predicting weather and air quality

The Rapdi Refresh model is used to predict air pollution. The forecast model based on the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) coupled with chemistry via the RACM chemical mechanism incuding MOSAIC/VBS for better prediction of secondary orangic aerosols (SOA). In addition, biogenic and anthropogenic emissions, deposition, convective and turbulent chemical transport, photolysis, and advective chemical transport are all treated simulataneously with the meteorology ("online"). For a more detailed description of the meteorology model, one may go to the Rapid Refresh model web page or to the WRF/Chem web page for a description of the chemistry model.

In addition to the forecasts shown below, the Rapid Refresh with chemistry (RR-Chem) is being run in real time on a high resolution domain over the western region of the US. Output from the forecasts are available under the HRRR-Chem (High Resolution Rapid Refresh with Chemistry) web page.

The RR-Chem forecasts are run twice a day - 00 and 12 UTC. A few plots from the model forecasts are provided below.

13 km RR-CHEM air quality and weather forecast using RACM-SOA-VBS with MADE/SORGAM

This model is run on NOAA/ESRL's 64-bit supercomputer. Meteorological initial and boundary conditions come from the GFS model forecasts. For air quality forecasts, the chemistry fields produced by a previous 12 h forecast are used to initiallize each new forecast. Anthropogenic emissions data for CONUS are from an improved EPA NEI-05 (National Emissions Inventory, 2005) data set with RETRO/EDGAR emissions used elsewhere.


Full domain at times:

CONUS at times:

This page developed by Bill Moninger and Randy Collander.
The real-time air quality prediction experiment is set up and run by Georg Grell and Steven Peckham.
Last modified: Monday, 9 Jul 2012