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RAGG - R EPISODIC AGGREGATION PACKAGE
Citation:
Schackles, N. RAGG - R EPISODIC AGGREGATION PACKAGE. U.S. Department of Commerce, Washington, DC, 2004.
Impact/Purpose:
This task has the following objectives:
Improve modelers' ability to focus on scientific and policy issues in modeling studies by providing software that supports composing, applying, and evaluating complex systems of models.
Improve the understanding of the interaction of the atmosphere and the underlying surface, especially the flux of mass in both directions, and EPA's ability to simulate that interaction.
Contribute to multimedia studies and assessments by applying state-of-the-art atmospheric models, estimating atmospheric contributions to multimedia issues and the sources of those contributions, and evaluating the models' strengths and weaknesses.
Description:
The RAGG package is an R implementation of the CMAQ episodic model aggregation method developed by Constella Group and the Environmental Protection Agency. RAGG is a tool to provide climatological seasonal and annual deposition of sulphur and nitrogen for multimedia management. Climatological, i.e., representative, multi-year average deposition is achieved through what is termed aggregation. Aggregation essentially uses a fixed, archived set of 40 atmospheric transport cases to drive CMAQ air quality modeling simulations. Then the 40 CMAQ transport case outputs are combined via a weighted average to create climatological, wet and dry, seasonal and annual average deposition estimates for nitrogen and sulfur across the United States. The Aggregation tool has been converted to work with CMAQ output and implemented using R, an open source statistical package. The RAGG output is in Models-3/IO-API format and can be visualized with PAVE. RAGG has been set up for both Unix/Linux and Windows platforms and is available for download on the Web. R is a widely used and supported open source statistical package that is free.
The research presented here was performed under the Memorandum of Understanding between the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the U.S. Department of Commerce's National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) under agreement number DW13921548. Although it has been reviewed by EPA and NOAA and approved for publication, it does not necessarily reflect their policies or views.