NOAA’s Global Forecast System Data in the Cloud for Community Air Quality Modeling

Abstract

Herein, we present the initial application of the NOAA-EPA Atmosphere-Chemistry Coupler (NACC) in the cloud (“NACC-Cloud”, version 1), which processes NOAA’s operational Global Forecast System version 16 (GFSv16) meteorology on-demand and produces model-ready meteorological files needed to drive U.S. EPA’s Community Multiscale Air Quality (CMAQ) model. NACC is adapted from the U.S. EPA’s Meteorology-Chemistry Interface Processor version 5 (MCIPv5) and is used as the primary model coupler in the current operational NWS/NOAA air quality forecasting model. The development and use of NACC-Cloud in this work are critical to provide the scientific community streamlined access to NOAA’s operational GFSv16 data and user-defined processing and download of model-ready, meteorological input for any regional CMAQ domain worldwide. The NACC-Cloud system was implemented on the Amazon® Web Services High-Performance Computing platform, and results from this work show that the NACC-Cloud system is immediately beneficial to the air quality modeling community worldwide.