A Method of Evaluating Atmospheric Models Using Tracer Measurements

Abstract

Abstract The authors have developed a method that uses tracer measurements as the basis for comparing and evaluating wind fields. An important advantage of the method is that the wind fields are evaluated from the tracer measurements without introducing dispersion calculations. The method can be applied to wind fields predicted by different atmospheric models or to wind fields obtained from interpolation and extrapolation of measured data. The method uses a cost function to quantify the success of wind fields in representing tracer transport. A cost function, “tracer potential,” is defined to account for the magnitude of the tracer concentration at the tracer receptors and the separation between each segment of a trajectory representing wind field transport and each of the tracer receptors. The tracer potential resembles a general expression for a physical potential because the success of a wind field trajectory is directly proportional to the magnitude of the tracer concentration and inversely proportion...