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VOLUME 29, SPRING 2008 Protecting Our Nation with Research that Makes a Difference CONTENTS GEO-TARGETED ALERTING SYSTEM (GTAS) Members of the Advisory Board Page 1 Peter K. Dorhout, Colorado State University Vice Provost for Graduate Studies DATA ASSIMILATION: EXTRACTING Bill Farland (Chairperson), MAXIMUM INFORMATION FROM Colorado State University Vice President for THE GOES-R DATA Research Richard Johnson, Page 4 Colorado State University Atmospheric Science Department Head CIRA’S MULTISENSOR BLENDED TOTAL “Sandy” E. MacDonald, PRECIPITABLE WATER PRODUCTS Deputy Assistant Administrator for Laboratories and Cooperative Institutes/Director, ESRL SERVE FORECASTER NEEDS Al Powell, Page 8 Director, NOAA/NESDIS/STAR Thomas H. Vonder Haar, Founding Director of CIRA and University REGIONAL IMPACTS OF OIL AND GAS Distinguished Professor, Colorado State University DEVELOPMENT IN THE Department of Atmospheric Science (ex officio) WESTERN UNITED STATES Sandra Woods, Colorado State University Dean of Page 12 Engineering Members of the Advisory Council ENVIRONMENTAL EDUCATION AND PUBLIC Hal C. Cochrane, OUTREACH Professor, Colorado State Department of Economics Page 20 Mark DeMaria, Team Leader, NOAA/NESDIS/RAMM Ingrid Guch, CLOUDSAT DPC HARDWARE Chief, NOAA/NESDIS/CoRP Page 24 Steven Koch, Director, Global Systems Division/ESRL Photos above, from top: Sonia M. Kreidenweis-Dandy Figure 1. Surface pressure ESRL’S NEW GLOBAL MODEL AND ITS Professor, Colorado State Department of forecast difference (hPa) Atmospheric Science between the experiments with IMPLEMENTATION and without data assimilation. Page 26 Thomas H. Vonder Haar (Chairperson) Figure 2. The blended TPW Founding Director of CIRA and University AMSU and SSM/I product Distinguished Professor, Colorado State University augmented with GPS data over Department of Atmospheric Science the CONUS on March 4, 2008. Figure 3. CIRA’s Director’s Magazine Staff Conference Room after the remodel. Figure 4. Wind speed Mary McInnis-Efaw, Editor (meter/sec.) at 500mb and Laura Leinen, Assistant Editor geopotential height at 500mb. Design Colorado State University, Communications and About the cover: Testing the Creative Services Geo-Targeted Alerting System Cooperative Institute for Research (GTAS) with a simulated toxic in the Atmosphere Technical Committee release over San Francisco. Photo courtesy of Will von Cliff Matsumoto, Donald Reinke, Renate Brummer, Dauster of ESRL/GSD. www.cira.colostate.edu Marco Rodriguez GTAS Geo-Targeted Alerting System (GTAS) Herb Grote Since the events of September 11, 2001 the atmosphere. AWIPS in New York City, considerable focus has been is currently being rede- placed on protecting the public from terrorist signed to use a Service attacks and other man-made disasters that could Oriented Architecture jeopardize the lives of a large number of people. (SOA) and is expected The release of biological, chemical, or radioac- to be ready for initial tive material into the atmosphere in a heavily deployment in fiscal year populated area could potentially kill thousands of 2010. This presents an people. The GTAS project is designed to develop opportunity to incor- an advanced warning system that can rapidly and porate essential new precisely warn and provide safety information capabilities to support and instructions to the public in case of a life- GTAS requirements. threatening toxic release. The geo-targeted A key element of NOAA’s current mission is concept came from to alert the public of potentially life-threatening exploratory work using weather events, such as blizzards, tornadoes, and reverse-911 notifica- flash-floods. The National Weather Service has tions to provide highly the infrastructure in place to forecast the weather localized notifications Figure 1. A sample GTAS screen and to disseminate the forecasts, watches, and of a hazardous weather event such as a tornado to showing some of the MADIS warnings to the public in an effective and timely affected individuals. To make geo-targeting fea- surface observations for the manner. Weather offices exist in all fifty states and sible requires a telephone database that is current, Washington, D.C. area. often are located near major population centers. complete, and contains very specific geographic Over the years, forecasters in these offices have location information in addition to just a street established local contacts, developed procedures, name and address. The initial vendor to support and gained significant experience in supporting this exploratory work was Intrado, Inc. located local governments during hazardous weather in Longmont, Colorado. The FX Collaboration events. That same infrastructure can be leveraged (FXC) system developed by the Global Systems to deal with terrorist attacks and other man-made Division at NOAA Earth System Research Lab was disasters. used to graphically generate a warning area and The NOAA infrastructure includes advanced electronically transmit the geographic coordi- new technologies that can generate high reso- nates in latitude and longitude to the vendor. The lution weather data for use by Department of vendor then accessed the telephone database and Homeland Security (DHS) operations. Some of determined all of the phone numbers within the the NOAA technologies designed to be used by geographic area. After operator confirmation, GTAS are the Advanced Weather Information the vendor’s system dialed the designated phone Processing System (AWIPS), the Meteorological numbers as quickly as possible according to a Assimilation and Data Ingest System (MADIS), simple rule, e.g., from north to south. The pur- the Graphical Forecast Editor (GFE), the Hybrid pose of the test was to determine the time it took Single Particle Lagrangian Integrated Trajectory to make the first phone call and the rate at which (HySPLIT) model, and the 4-km Nonhydrostatic calls could be made thereafter. Obviously, if the Mesoscale Model (NMM). The AWIPS system is vendor was unable to make the first call before the in all of the NWS forecast offices and provides event entered the area or unable to call all of the forecasters with a powerful tool to view and numbers before the event traversed the area, the understand the past, present, and future state of system was deemed of limited use. 1 GTAS DHS’ FEMA quickly became interested in weather forecast models are available to initial- developing a public warning concept for poten- ize the dispersion model. Upon completion, the tial toxic release in the National Capital Region client is notified and the dispersion plume can be based on our reverse-911 geo-targeting work. viewed as a vector graphic or image. The prototype system is based on FXC, which Another feature added to GTAS was the has many of the features of AWIPS. FXC is well ability to send the warning area polygon to suited for developing this prototype since it can multiple reverse-911 vendors. GTAS needed the be modified easily, unlike AWIPS which is under flexibility to communicate with different vendors software configuration management by the NWS. according to their unique network and security It also has many of the features required by GTAS, requirements. The same message, in the form such as weather data display and interaction, of a simple custom XML document, is sent to real-time collaboration, graphical annotation, and all of the vendors. In the final version, the XML secure transmission of data to remote servers. The message would comply with the OASIS Standard FXC capability allows participants at physically Common Alerting Protocol (CAP). The ability different locations to view identical weather data to notify several vendors can be used in areas display and, through interactive tools, help in the where a single vendor does not have a complete discussion of the forecast. Also, since FXC is writ- telephone database for the area, or to selectively ten in Java, the same programming language used determine which of several vendors provides the by AWIPS II, it will make it easier to transfer code best performance. GTAS supports encrypted https to the new AWIPS system. Some portions of the with security certificates and keys. FXC graphic annotation code have already been In order to accurately initialize the dispersion ported to AWIPS II. model and draw an accurate warning polygon, the FXC needed some additional features in map background information must be accurate order to be used as a functional prototype for and of high spatial resolution. The initial maps GTAS. The first and most significant feature to obtained from AWIPS had insufficient detail on be added was the ability to run the HySPLIT the city scale. In order to meet the GTAS require- dispersion model. The HySPLIT dispersion model ments, high resolution (ESRI) shapefiles were Figure 2. View of the HySPLIT calculates the dispersion assuming either puff or downloaded and mapped to the Washington, dispersion model dialog box superimposed on the dispersion particle dispersion. The model’s default configu- D.C. area. A utility to read shapefiles was partially plume generated by the model. ration assumes a puff dispersion horizontally implemented using the open source Java GIS and particle dispersion toolkit GeoTools. Additional work is required to vertically. The model is obtain greater benefit from the available shapefile initialized on the GTAS information. client using a dialog Additional enhancements were made to deal window that allows the with firewalls and Network Address Translation user to specify various (NAT).