Preliminary evaluation of a regional atmospheric chemical data assimilation system for environmental surveillance

We report the progress of an ongoing effort by the Air Resources Laboratory, NOAA to build a prototype regional Chemical Analysis System (ARLCAS). The ARLCAS focuses on providing long-term analysis of the three dimensional (3D) air-pollutant concentration fields over the continental U.S. It leverages expertise from the NASA Earth Science Division-sponsored Air Quality Applied Science Team (AQAST) for the state-of-science knowledge in atmospheric and data assimilation sciences. The ARLCAS complies with national operational center requirement protocols and aims to have the modeling system to be maintained by a national center. Meteorology and chemistry observations consist of land-, air- and space-based observed and quality-assured data. We develop modularized testing to investigate the efficacies of the various components of the ARLCAS. The sensitivity testing of data assimilation schemes showed that with the increment of additional observational data sets, the accuracy of the analysis chemical fields also increased incrementally in varying margins. The benefit is especially noted for additional data sets based on a different platform and/or a different retrieval algorithm. We also described a plan to apply the analysis chemical fields in environmental surveillance at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.