A Stochastic Methodology for Regional Wind-Field Modeling

Abstract

Abstract Three-dimensional, regional scale (≈1000 km) air-quality simulation models require hourly inputs of U and V wind components for each vertical layer of the model and for each grid cell in the horizontal. The standard North American meteorological observation network is used to derive the wind-field inputs for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's Regional Oxidant Model (ROM) and other regional models. While a fairly dense surface network with hourly observations exists, upper-air data are obtained only twice per day at monitoring sites typically separated by distances of 300–500 km. Using these data to derive the more spatially and temporally resolved gridded wind fields needed by the ROM introduces uncertainties and errors into the model. We present a method of developing gridded wind fields for the ROM that accounts for these nondeterministic features. The method produces a family of potential gridded wind fields that allows for the stochastic nature of the interpolation process. Examples o...