Case Studies of an Operational Mesoscale Modelling System in the Northeast United States

The Deep Thunder mesoscale weather modelling and visualization system has been run semi-operationally since January 2001 at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research in Yorktown Heights, NY focusing on the New York City metropolitan area. The model used in this work is derived from earlier work supporting the 1996 Centennial Olympic Games in Atlanta (Snook et al, 1998). This is a highly modified version of the modelling system described by Pielke et al, 1992. The model is configured in a triply-nested domain structure. The outermost domain covers much of the northeast United States at 16 km. The middle domain includes the greater New York City tri-state area at 4 km and the innermost domain covers metropolitan New York City at 1 km. In addition, all nests are configured at 31 vertical levels. Figure 1 shows the domain configuration for the 4 km and 1 km nests, with the boundary of the latter marked in red on this terrain map. Locations of National Weather Service metar reporting stations used in this study are shown in white. Selected airport (IATA) locations and municipal centers are indicated in black. Currently, two 24-hour forecast runs are produced each day. The details of the system architecture, modelling and implementation are discussed in Treinish et al, 2003. We present herein the preliminary results of a portion of our continuing work in overall system implementation and benchmarking.