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Major John T. McCabe
and
Captain Thomas D. Potter

A simple method of finding the percentage frequency that areas near a target will be affected by radioactive fallout of a critical dose is presented. The target location, the climatological period, the fission yield, and a critical dose or dose rate must be specified. If the distribution of the actual effective winds is not available, the assumption of a circular normal distribution of the effective wind is made. This distribution can be obtained by C. E. P. Brooks' method or, if the points are numerous as in describing an areal frequency pattern, by a mechanical method described herein.

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J. Horel
,
T. Potter
,
L. Dunn
,
W. J. Steenburgh
,
M. Eubank
,
M. Splitt
, and
J. Onton

The 2002 Winter Olympic and Paralympic Games will be hosted by Salt Lake City, Utah, during February–March 2002. Adverse weather during this period may delay sporting events, while snow and ice-covered streets and highways may impede access by the athletes and spectators to the venues. While winter snowstorms and other large-scale weather systems typically have widespread impacts throughout northern Utah, hazardous winter weather is often related to local terrain features (the Wasatch Mountains and Great Salt Lake are the most prominent ones). Examples of such hazardous weather include lake-effect snowstorms, ice fog, gap winds, down-slope windstorms, and low visibility over mountain passes.

A weather support system has been developed to provide weather information to the athletes, games officials, spectators, and the interested public around the world. This system is managed by the Salt Lake Olympic Committee and relies upon meteorologists from the public, private, and academic sectors of the atmospheric science community. Weather forecasting duties will be led by National Weather Service forecasters and a team of private weather forecasters organized by KSL, the Salt Lake City NBC television affiliate. Other government agencies, commercial firms, and the University of Utah are providing specialized forecasts and support services for the Olympics. The weather support system developed for the 2002 Winter Olympics is expected to provide long-term benefits to the public through improved understanding, monitoring, and prediction of winter weather in the Intermountain West.

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Gerald L. Potter
,
George J. Huffman
,
David T. Bolvin
,
Michael G. Bosilovich
,
Judy Hertz
, and
Laura E. Carriere
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Thomas J. Phillips
,
Gerald L. Potter
,
David L. Williamson
,
Richard T. Cederwall
,
James S. Boyle
,
Michael Fiorino
,
Justin J. Hnilo
,
Jerry G. Olson
,
Shaocheng Xie
, and
J. John Yio

To significantly improve the simulation of climate by general circulation models (GCMs), systematic errors in representations of relevant processes must first be identified, and then reduced. This endeavor demands that the GCM parameterizations of unresolved processes, in particular, should be tested over a wide range of time scales, not just in climate simulations. Thus, a numerical weather prediction (NWP) methodology for evaluating model parameterizations and gaining insights into their behavior may prove useful, provided that suitable adaptations are made for implementation in climate GCMs. This method entails the generation of short-range weather forecasts by a realistically initialized climate GCM, and the application of six hourly NWP analyses and observations of parameterized variables to evaluate these forecasts. The behavior of the parameterizations in such a weather-forecasting framework can provide insights on how these schemes might be improved, and modified parameterizations then can be tested in the same framework.

To further this method for evaluating and analyzing parameterizations in climate GCMs, the U.S. Department of Energy is funding a joint venture of its Climate Change Prediction Program (CCPP) and Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) Program: the CCPP-ARM Parameterization Testbed (CAPT). This article elaborates the scientific rationale for CAPT, discusses technical aspects of its methodology, and presents examples of its implementation in a representative climate GCM.

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