MM5 Data for the United States of America

MM5 data for USA are available for 2006 in two formats (tiled or native MM5 binary formats) and in the following three packages:

• Individual Tiles, of which there are 975 covering the Full Domain,
  
  
• Regional Tile Groups (square or rectangular area-based groupings of tiled data),
  
  
• Full Domain, in either tiled format (for use with the CALPUFF modeling system) or native binary format (for use with models such as CMAQ).

Quick Links

      ·  MM5 Data Characteristics

      ·  Individual Tiles

      ·  Regional Tile Groups

      ·  Full Domain

      ·  Price List

      ·  Order Form

      ·  Available Storage Media

      ·  Software

MM5 Data Characteristics

• Hourly time resolution
• Horizontal grid spacing: 12 km
• 40 vertical half-sigma levels:
  • 16 levels below 1,000 meters
    • 11, 34, 60, 90, 123, 160, 202, 250, 304, 365, 434, 511, 600, 700, 814, 944 meters (nominal heights above sea level surface)
  • 9 levels between 1,000-3,500 meters
  • 15 levels above 3,500 meters
• Projection Information:
       Projection: Lambert Conformal Conic (LCC)
       Origin: 40.0°N, 98.0°W
       Matching Latitudes: 20.0°N, 60.0°N
       Datum: NWS-84

Individual Tiles

Below is a plot showing the complete set of Individual Tiles covering the Full Domain.


Each tile covers an area of 120 km x 120 km (10 x 10 12-km grid points). It includes hourly data for a full year. The time stamp of the data is UTC (GMT) time. Each tile contains 8760 hours (or 8784 hours for a leap year) plus 12 hours of the prior year (in UTC time) and 12 hours of the following year (in UTC time).

The hourly 3-D meteorological parameters included in the tiles are wind speed, wind direction, temperature, pressure, geopotential height, vertical velocity, relative humidity, mixing ratios for water vapor, cloud water, rain, ice, snow, graupel. Hourly surface (2-D) parameters in the tiles include sea-level pressure, rainfall amount, snow cover, short wave and long wave radiation at the surface, air temperature at 2m, specific humidity at 2m, wind speed and wind direction at 10m and sea surface temperature. There are 52,000 3-D data points per hour and 1,000 2-D data points per hour included in each tile. Each tile contains one year of data in a packed (compressed) format that is roughly 450 MB in size.

CALMET contains algorithms to compute the cloud cover and ceiling height for each CALMET grid point from the relative humidity and liquid water data contained in the MM5 dataset.

Files:

• MM5_USA_Tiles_CornerCoords.xls  (Excel: 204KB; PDF: 68KB)
  • spreadsheet with latitude/longitude corner coordinates for each Individual Tile
  
  
• MM5_USA_Tiles.pdf  (PDF: 295KB)
  • plots of Individual Tiles on the Full Domain and each Regional Tile Group

Regional Tile Groups

Groups of tiles covering any sub-region can be requested by providing the tile number for the southwest corner and the tile number for the northeast corner of any user specified regions. The plot below provides an example of how to select a sub-region defining a set of tiles.

When requesting a certain number of tiles within a specfied region, just provide the tile number of tile on the southwest corner and northeast corner of the desired region, as indicated with red on the plot below. In this example, tiles 581 and 761 would define desired area.

Full Domain

Below is a plot showing the full extents of the USA MM5 dataset.



Files:

• MM5_USA_FullDomain.pdf  (PDF: 775KB)
  • plots of the Full Domain with and without Individual Tiles shown

Price List

Below is a summary of the pricing structure for the USA MM5 Dataset.





Note that the pricing structure is such that the cost per tile is reduced as larger numbers of tiles are purchased simultaneously. The table above shows how price per tile changes with increasing numbers of tiles purchased. Users requesting 2 tiles or less will pay $200 per tile. Users requesting 4 tiles will pay $120 per tile. Users purchasing more than 4 tiles will pay a flat charge per groups of tiles. For users purchasing from 5 to 9 tiles, the total cost will be $540 while purchasing from 101 to 200 tiles the total cost will be $1,500. As a user purchases larger numbers of tiles, the cost per tile continues to drop.

Tiles can be added at later times to cover larger areas. The extraction software provided with the tiles combines tiles into a single 3D.DAT file. Each tile contains one year of 3-D MM5 data for an area covering 120 km x 120 km.

Order Form

MM5_USA_Order_Form.doc  (Word: 88KB)

MM5_USA_Order_Form.pdf  (PDF: 28KB)

Available Storage Media

Individual tiles or the Regional Tile Groupings are available on either DVD or USB hard drive. The Full Domain dataset is provided on a hard drive only. Be sure to specify the hard drive format on the order form and include the fee if requesting the data on a hard drive.

External USB Hard Drive
Hard drives provided are USB 2.0 external drives of at least 300 GB capacity. The power supply can handle voltage in the range of 100-240, 50-60Hz but contain a USA-type of electric plug that will require an adapter (not provided). User-supplied hard drives can be accommodated as a special order.

DVD/CD Orders
Orders of up to 10 tiles can be requested on CDs as a special order. Otherwise, data will be provided on DVDs.

Special Orders
Please contact asg@trcsolutions.com for information on special orders.

Software

Easy-to-use software is provided with the tiles to uncompress the data and create a CALMET-compatible 3D.DAT file. Any rectangular set of tiles can be combined into a 3D.DAT file for input into CALMET. The user selects a range in terms of latitude/longitude or MM5 grid points to be extracted and a time period and the extraction software will identify the tiles needed and perform the data extraction. New tiles can be added to existing tiles to allow the capability to create larger domains in the 3D.DAT files.