CONCORDE Meteorological Analysis (CMA) Data Guide

Lau, Y. H., & Fitzpatrick, P. J. (2018). CONCORDE Meteorological Analysis (CMA) Data Guide. Mississippi State University: Geosystems Research Institute.

CONCORDE is the CONsortium for oil spill exposure pathways in COastal River-Dominated Ecosystems (CONCORDE), and is an interdisciplinary research program funded by the Gulf of Mexico Research Initiative (GoMRI) to conduct scientific studies of the impacts of oil, dispersed oil and dispersant on the Gulf’s ecosystem (Greer et al. 2018). A CONCORDE goal is to implement a synthesis model containing circulation and biogeochemistry components of the Northern Gulf of Mexico shelf system which can ultimately aid in prediction of oil spill transport and impacts. The CONCORDE Meteorological Analysis (CMA) is an hourly gridded NetCDF dataset which provides atmospheric forcing for the synthesis model. CMA includes a variety of parameters from multiple sources. The Real-Time Mesoscale Analysis (RTMA; De Pondeca et al. 2011) provides the surface momentum and the thermodynamic atmospheric data. The radiation parameters and total cloud cover percentage are from the North American Mesoscale (NAM) Forecast System fields. The hourly precipitation is extracted from the Next Generation Weather Radar (NEXRAD) Level-III. Gridded sea surface temperature fields (SST) are computed daily using a 10-day running mean of the Advanced Very High-Resolution Radiometer (AVHRR) SST product. The Coupled Ocean-Atmosphere Response Experiment flux (COARE) algorithm calculates sensible heat flux and surface momentum stresses (Fairall et al. 2003). CMA’s spatial domain’s lowest west grid point is at 90.13°W, 29°N, and the highest east grid point is at 87.05°W, 30.94°N. The grid spacing is 0.01 degree, and the grid dimension is 309 by 195.