P53     Operational air quality forecast for the Gulf of Mexico. Phase 1: meteorological evaluation.

Garcia, Agustin, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de Mexico, CCA, Mexico, Victor Almanza, Cuauhtemoc  Turrent,  and Favio Medrano, Ensenada Center for Scientific Research and Higher Education (CICESE), Mexico

In November 2018 an Operational Air quality forecasting system was implemented for the region encompassing the Gulf of Mexico. The model is driven with the near real-time GFS operational fields at 0.5˚.  The atmospheric chemistry of the forecasting system is resolved with the WRF-chem model using the RADM2 chemical mechanism. The emissions are taken from the US NEI 2011, the CAMS Global ship emissions, the Mexican NEI 2014 and the biogenic emissions are represented with the on-line MEGAN model.
In this work, the evaluation of surface meteorological variables of the operational forecast for the winter season is presented. These variables include 2m temperature, relative humidity, wind speed and wind direction. The model evaluation was conducted with  the NCEP Unified Post Processor (UPP) and the Model Evaluation Tools (MET) verification package, using the NCEP PrepBufr ADP Global Upper Air and Surface Observations (DS337.0 dataset). Additional plots and statistics were obtained with the R openair package.  Results show agreement between the model and observations for these variables both inland and over the ocean.