ARL Weekly News – March 31, 2023

Recent Events and Announcements

Release of NACC-Cloud Version 1.0 for Community Air Quality Modeling

Under the ongoing NOAA-OAR Cloud Incubator Project, Drs. Patrick Campbell, Rick Jiang, and Zach Moon of NOAA-ARL ASMD are pleased to announce the release of the NOAA-EPA Atmosphere Chemistry Coupler (NACC) in the cloud, version 1.0 (i.e., NACC-Cloud v1). NACC-Cloud provides an easy way for the air quality modeling community to on-demand process NOAA’s current operational Global Forecast System version 16 (GFSv16) meteorology files, and then output model-ready meteorological files needed to drive the widely used U.S. EPA’s Community Multiscale Air Quality (CMAQ) for any region across the world (see figure below). The NACC-Cloud system has been implemented on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) High Performance Computing platform, where an ARL-hosted web-based user interface has been developed and is available for user access at: https://nacc.arl.noaa.gov/nacc/.

Visit To AFTAC

ASMD’s Dr. Christopher Loughner traveled to the Air Force Technical Applications Center (AFTAC) at Patrick Space Force Base, Florida, from March 23-24, to participate in discussions related to AFTAC’s HYSPLIT related applications. There was a very positive and productive exchange of information and Dr. Loughner was able to provide AFTAC personnel with some key assistance related to some issues that they had with utilizing HYSPLIT. ARL has a long and productive relationship with AFTAC and they are also one of our key customers (as well as a funder of some of our work) and so this meeting was not only very productive but was an example of the great cooperation that both agencies have exhibited over the years.