Station and Campaign Analysis Products:

Please see our PRODUCT LISTING which maintains links to currently available runs. For the time being most links to stations and/or campaigns can still be found on their old pages (i.e. zardoz or niflheim). Please update your bookmarks, as these links will be changing shortly.

Most stations are being run under the EUCAARI project, further information about the available runs can be found there.

CHEMICAL FORECAST PRODUCTS (NOTE: last forecast run July 2008 for the POLARCAT campaigns):

For various campaigns and other purposes we provide a forecast product. An overview of this tool is provided below.

Presently the forecast and analysis runs are archived for the time period of the POLARCAT campaigns. Please see:

FLEXPART Interactive Forecast Browser, Norwegian Institute for Air Research (NILU-ATMOS)

This is the primary tool for exploring FLEXPART forecasts. With the interactive browser we provide access to tools for creating curtain plots, time-height plots, and horizontal plots along flight tracks or defined transects. Plotting of time-series along a flight track, or for a particular station is also provided by request.

FLEXPART static forecast products, NILU.

The link above provides access to a listing of ALL the statically produced forecast products. These were generated every 6 hours (0,6,12,18 UTC) during the POLARCAT campaigns and provide snapshots of CO, SO2, NOx, and BC tracers in both total column (conccol) and elevation slices (conc). See this link for more information.

During POLARCAT (2008) we provided quick links to all our products: available here
A few are also in the table below.

european	north america	asian	biomass burning	Combined ANTHRO
Total Column CO	Total Column CO	Total Column CO	Total Column CO	Total Column CO
Total Column NOx	Total Column NOx	Total Column NOx	n/a	Total Column NOx
Total Column SO2	Total Column SO2	Total Column SO2	n/a	Total Column SO2
Total Column BC	Total Column BC	Total Column BC	Total Column BC	Total Column BC

FLEXPART forecast system essentials

Tracers

Four anthropogenic emission tracers carried for 20 days:

• CO – purely passive
• NOx – purely passive
• SO4 – susceptible to dry and wet deposition
• BC (Black carbon) – susceptible to dry and wet deposition

Two biomass burning emission tracers:

• CO – purely passive
• BC (Black carbon) – susceptible to dry and wet deposition

The removal of BC and oxidized sulfur is likely to be overestimated, since BC is assumed to be hydrophilic from right after the emission, sulfur is assumed to be emitted as sulfate.

The anthropogenic tracers also carry regional information: European, North American, Asian origin.

Input data

0.5°x0.5° resolution GFS data for the real-time analysis and up to 3 hour forecast, 1°x1° resolution GFS data for the forecast; the forecasts strongly benefit from the high-resolution 0.5°x0.5° analyses!

26 vertical levels, every 3 hours

Output resolution

1°x1° globally, 0.25°x0.25° over Europe (10°W-40°E, 40°N-90°N)

16 vertical levels, every 3 hours

Update frequency and timing

4 times daily; forecasts will be started ca. 4 hours after analysis time and will be available ca. 8 hours after analysis time, i.e., forecasts based on 0-UTC meteorological analysis will be available at about 8 UTC (±1 hour, depending on the tracer).

A note about the pole

Since grid cells become very small near the pole, the particle counting statistics (which depend on the number of particles residing in a grid cell) become worse towards the pole, especially when concentrations are low. This leads to somewhat noisy concentration fields just around the pole. However, the transport of the particles itself is not affected by this – FLEXPART does not have any numerical problems near the poles. Just disregard that the output is somewhat more noisy around the pole, which is just due to the extremely high resolution of the output grid around the pole.