Midwest Real-time Earth System Modeling Complex

Sponsors/Partners

The ESMC project acknowledges the following (past and present) sponsors and/or partners.

1. 2019 – present: United States Department of Agriculture (USDA)
2. 2017 – 2018: NASA's Citizen Science Program
3. 2016 – present: Iowa Informatics Initiative (UI3) and the High Performance Computing at the University of Iowa
4. 2014 – 2016: Office for Research and Economic Development (ORED) and High-performance Computing Center in University of Nebraska – Lincoln (UNL)

Weather & Air Quality Forecast

The modeling is done using WRF-Chem version 3.8. The NAM (North American Mesoscale Model) weather prediction data is used for initializing the model every 6 hours. The irrigation scheme follows the paper by Aegerter et al. (2017). The emissions for aerosols and trace gases are from the EPA. Fire emissions are obtained every 6 hours from the NRL (http://www.nrlmry.navy.mil/flambe/) polar-orbiting satellite database. The forecast is updated 4 times a day, and each forecast is made for 72 hours.

Applications & Apps

ESMC has been providing weather and air quality forecasts for the citizens in the high-plains and nearby regions since 2015, as well as high-resolution (4 km) weather and air quality forecasts for citizens in Los Angeles since May 2017. The mobile-phone apps are also available upon request, and they provide users with the hourly forecast at their exact location.