COMPARISON OF CO-LOCATED DCNet AND AWS WEATHERBUG URBAN TEMPERATURE OBSERVATIONS

摘要

The Air Resources Laboratory (ARL) of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration initiated a research program involving the private sector, to explore the utility of using local meteorological data from private as well as government sources in forecasting for urban areas. The program is generally referred as UrbaNet. The first studies focused on the National Capital Region using ARL's DCNet system of urban observations as the core network. The work has been in collaboration with AWS Convergence Technologies, Inc. (AWS Weatherbug), which operates a private/commercial meteorological network with a large array of meteorological measurement sites within the United States. The AWS Weatherbug network provides data on wind velocity and temperature, averaged over fifteen minute periods, and accompanying evaluations of the variability of each meteorological component. The goal of this cooperative agreement has been to determine an optimal methodology for determining how meteorological data collected by entities other than the National Weather Service can be integrated with observations presently employed, so as to improve the accuracy of urban and other local forecasts. While the focus continues to be on the forecasting of personal exposures to hazardous materials, the suite of observations can be used to address a wide range of issues to include climate. In this study, aspirated temperature systems as currently deployed within NOAA's Climate Reference Network were installed at three DCNet stations co-located with AWS Weatherbug. While there is considerable scatter between individual 15-minute average temperatures, long term means are quite correlated with correlation coefficients above 0.98.