ARL News
UrbaNet National Capital Region Testbed Completed
June 29, 2007
With the installation of meteorological instruments on the roof of the headquarters of the American Geophysical Union in Washington, DC, the Air Resources Laboratory (ARL) completed the deployment of the UrbaNet National Capital Region Testbed. The dozen-station testbed network supports research into improved approaches for forecasting the dispersion of hazardous materials in urban areas. ARL and its partner AWS Convergence Technologies will use the data from the testbed to evaluate the utility of integrating diverse mesonet data to provide a more complete picture of meteorological conditions in complex urban regions. ARL will also use the data to evaluate and improve high-resolution models of winds and dispersion in those regions.
The stations in the testbed network collect temperature, humidity, and wind information with high temporal resolution. This information is used to estimate the amount of turbulence or mixing in the air and the direction that pollutants will flow. The data from the testbed network are available from ARL (http://dcnet.atdd.noaa.gov/index.php) and from through the Meteorological Assimilation Data Ingest System operated by NOAA’s Earth System Research Laboratory (http://madis.noaa.gov/).
More information:
- http://www.atdd.noaa.gov/dcnet.htm
Contact information:
Will Pendergrass
Phone: (865) 576-6234
e-mail: will.pendergrass@noaa.gov