Tang Expanding Chemical Data Assimilation System To Support NOAA UFS

Youhua Tang, Senior Researcher, Center for Spatial Information Science and Systems (CSISS), received $387,363 from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) for a project aimed at expanding a chemical data assimilation system to support NOAA's Unified Forecast System (UFS). UFS is a community-based, coupled, comprehensive Earth system modeling system. It is designed to support the Weather Enterprise and to be the source system for NOAA's operational numerical weather prediction applications. 

The Weather Enterprise is made up of three main sectors that contribute to the science and application of weather and weather forecasting—academia, government, and the nation's weather and climate industry. Each sector plays a critical role in understanding, observing, forecasting, and keeping communities informed of weather dangers.  

Tang will divide the scope of the work into regional and global parts.  

 He will follow the Goddard Chemistry Aerosol Radiation and Transport (FV-GOCART) template to implement the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory (GFDL) Finite-Volume Cubed-Sphere Dynamical Core-Community Multiscale Air Quality (FV3-CMAQ) interface.   

He will also leverage collaborators at NOAA's National Environmental Satellite, Data, and Information Service (NESDIS) and Joint Center for Satellite Data Assimilation (JCSDA)/ Community Radiative Transfer Model (CRTM) to implement Aerosol Optical Depth (AOD) within the Joint Effort for Data Assimilation Integration (JEDI) Unified Forward Operator (UFO). 

Additionally, Tang will develop the locally and seasonally variable Background Error Covariance (BEC) matrix, which will reflect dependence on model errors on emissions sources.  

 Funding for this project began in September 2020 and will end in late August 2022.