Analysis & Tools

Climate/Weather

Clark County Department of Air Quality (DAQ)

Forecasts

The FAST-LVOS intensives will be planned using the NCEP Global Forecast System (GFS) long range weather forecasts together with O3 and CO forecasts from the NOAA RAP-Chem and RAQMS models.

Note that the lower resolution, but longer forecast time RAQMS runs are used to initialize the higher resolution RAP-Chem runs.

The RAP-Chem and RAQMS models forecast total O3 and CO on isobaric and isentropic surfaces, respectively. The 320 K RAQMS surface lies in the upper troposphere (> 7 km asl) and the 500 hPa RAP-Chem surface lies in the mid-troposphere (about 5-6 km asl). The 300 K and 700 hPa surfaces roughly correspond to about 3 km asl. Use the RAP-Chem "Domain 1" to show the entire model domain and "Domain 2" to show the western U.S.

We will keep abreast of wildfires using information from: