2017 Urban Dispersion Virtual Workshop
Designing the Next Generation Urban Dispersion Field Programs
Motivation
Urban dispersion experiments have been extremely useful for development and testing of transport and dispersion models. However, there is an urgent need for improvement of the science of urban transport and validation of the current generation of dispersion models. New, high-resolution data in the multi-scale environment with significant gradients (e.g., land/urban/water) that characterizes major urban areas is necessary to increase accuracy and improve speed of these models as well as to develop model products that specifically meet the needs of the emergency response community. New data are also necessary to design effective real-time meteorological and Chemical, Biological, Radiological, Nuclear (CBRN) monitoring networks necessary to support emergency response and to initialize models.
It is timely to design and execute the next generation of Urban Dispersion field programs to address these needs.
There have been significant technological improvements since the last urban dispersion experiments were conducted in 2005. Models are now more sophisticated, and capable of data assimilation. New tracer techniques and equipment are available that can provide data with unprecedented temporal and spatial resolution. And the development and deployment of high resolution meteorological instruments such as mobile Radar and LIDAR systems and Hyper spectral imaging producing data with improved spatial and temporal resolution are now available for initializing and evaluating state-of-the-art models.
The Urban Dispersion Workshop will bring together modelers, experimentalists, and emergency responders to design the next generation transport and dispersion programs. The 3 hour virtual workshop will consist of presentations by invited modeling and measurement experts and emergency response and health physics professionals and focused discussions to produce a white paper.
Questions to be addressed include:
- How do we best utilize models to design experiments?
- What is the spatial and temporal resolution of tracer and meteorological data necessary to improve model physics and support model validation?
- How do we design tracer release and sampling to address questions temporal (e.g., diurnal and seasonal variation) and spatial (e.g., land/urban/water gradients) for the broadest applicability?
- What are the characteristics and density of meteorological measurements necessary for model initialization and development?
- What are the needs of the emergency response community and how do we design models and experiments to address them?
The product of the workshop will be a science plan for the next generation urban dispersion field experiment and a paper summarizing the workshop for submission to the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society.
Workshop Organizers
- Martin Schoonen (BNL)
- Tom Watson (BNL)
- Julie Pullen (Stevens Institute)
- Pavlos Kollias (SBU/BNL)
Hosted By
Note: This event falls under Exemption E. Meetings such as Advisory Committee and Federal Advisory Committee meetings. Solicitation/Funding Opportunity Announcement Review Board meetings, peer review/objective review panel meetings,evaluation panel/board meetings, and program kick-off and review meetings (including those for grants and contracts).
Last Modified: October 29, 2021
