Surface and Precipitation Stations - New Mexico Environment ...

3.0 Geophysical and Meteorological Data
As previously noted, all the geophysical and meteorological data necessary to conduct the Class I
visibility modeling is provided by WRAP RMC on their website
http://pah.cert.ucr.edu/aqm/308/bart.shtml. All files will be downloaded from their website for use
in the aforementioned analyses.
3.1 Modeling Domain
The modeling domain will be the same domain established in the GEO.DAT file describe in Section
3.5. The origin coordinates of the domain is Latitude 40.0 N, Longitude 97.0 W and will be
assigned as the 0, 0 reference point of the domain. The southwest corner of the modeling domain is
latitude 30.9 N, Longitude 111.3 W, which translates to -1368.0 km (X) and -900.0 (Y) in LCC
coordinates. The domain will measure 864 km in the east-west (X) and north-south (Y) direction.
At a refined grid spacing of 4-km, the number of X grid cells and the number of the Y grid cells will
be 216. The modeling domain is shown in Figure 3-1.
3.2 Mesoscale Model Data
Pennsylvania State University in conjunction with the National Center for Atmospheric Research
(NCAR) Assessment Laboratory have developed mesoscale meteorological data sets of prognostic
wind fields, or “guess” fields, for the United States. The hourly meteorological variables used to
create these data sets are extensive and are used to initialize the modeling domain with
meteorological data. The daily MM5 meteorological data files provided on the WRAP RMC
website for the years 2001, 2002, and 2003 will be utilized as input into CALMET.
The MM5 data sets, used to simulate atmospheric variables within the modeling domain in
CALMET, although advanced, lack the fine detail of specific temporal and spatial meteorological
variables and geophysical data. These variables were processed into the appropriate format and
introduced into the CALMET model through the utilization of additional data files obtained from
numerous sources. These ancillary data files are described in more detail in the following sections.
3-1 4/13/2007