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National Urban Database and Access Portal Tool
Citation:
CHING, J. K., M. BROWN, S. Burian, F. Chen, R. Cionco, A. Hanna, T. Hultgren, D. Sailor, H. Taha, AND D. J. WILLIAMS. National Urban Database and Access Portal Tool. BULLETIN OF THE AMERICAN METEOROLOGICAL SOCIETY. American Meteorological Society, Boston, MA, 90(8):1157-1168, (2009).
Impact/Purpose:
The National Exposure Research Laboratory′s (NERL′s) Atmospheric Modeling Division (AMD) conducts research in support of EPA′s mission to protect human health and the environment. AMD′s research program is engaged in developing and evaluating predictive atmospheric models on all spatial and temporal scales for forecasting the Nation′s air quality and for assessing changes in air quality and air pollutant exposures, as affected by changes in ecosystem management and regulatory decisions. AMD is responsible for providing a sound scientific and technical basis for regulatory policies based on air quality models to improve ambient air quality. The models developed by AMD are being used by EPA, NOAA, and the air pollution community in understanding and forecasting not only the magnitude of the air pollution problem, but also in developing emission control policies and regulations for air quality improvements.
Description:
Based on the need for advanced treatments of high resolution urban morphological features (e.g., buildings, trees) in meteorological, dispersion, air quality and human exposure modeling systems for future urban applications, a new project was launched called the National Urban Database and Access Portal Tool (NUDAPT). NUDAPT is sponsored by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (USEPA) and involves collaborations and contributions from many groups including federal and state agencies and from private and academic institutions here and in other countries. It is designed to produce and provide gridded fields of urban canopy parameters for various new and advanced descriptions of model physics to improve urban simulations given the availability of new high-resolution data of buildings, vegetation, and land use. Additional information include gridded anthropogenic heating and population data is incorporated to further improve urban simulations and to encourage and facilitate decision support and application linkages to human exposure models. An important core-design feature is the utilization of web portal technology to enable NUDAPT to be a “Community” based system. This web-based portal technology will facilitate customizing of data handling and retrievals (http://www.nudapt.org). This article provides an overview of NUDAPT and several example applications.
URLs/Downloads:
National Urban Database and Access Portal Tool, NUDAPT (PDF, NA pp, 2145 KB, about PDF)Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society
