Scope of Work

WRAP Annual Ambient Data Report

02/28/01 DRAFT by Marc Pitchford

 

Overview:

The WRAP Annual Ambient Data Report will be published electronically once per year and distributed through the WRAP ambient database web site.  It will feature data summaries for the previous calendar year as well as some simple trends to promote comparison of current year’s data with that from previous years.  The overall approach will be to develop a core set of analysis software that generates standard statistical and graphical summaries of the data for every year’s annual report.  Over the years the software that generates these material will be enhanced so that the scope of the reports will evolve over the years.  Feedback from users of the report will be a primary source of information for the direction of this evolution.  The report will consist primarily of the standard output from this software and will have only a modest amount of year-specific commentary describing some of the prominent features of these automated products.  [The planned WRAP Causes of Haze Report is the primary data interpretation report that will be prepared on an every five-year schedule.]

 

The report will feature summaries of data that are representative of the visibility-protected class I areas (i.e. IMPROVE and some IMPROVE Protocol sites in the WRAP area), but will also use some data gathered elsewhere to the extent that it helps to understand the conditions associated with the class I area haze levels (e.g. meteorological data).  The report should be prepared in such a way that it provides a good overview of visibility conditions for the WRAP area as a whole, sub-regions of similar data characteristics, and individual class I areas. In addition to looking at annual and seasonal summaries, the report will feature summaries of the 20% best and worst aerosol calculated extinction days because of their central role in the Regional Haze Rule.  The processed statistical summary information that was used to generate the tabular and graphical output for the annual report should also be downloadable by the users.

 

One of the primary uses of the report will be to select subsets of the summary material that can be reformatted by users such as states and tribes who wish to prepare their own custom reports by cutting and pasting from the Annual Report. For this reason and because of the expected substantial amount of output in this report (i.e. regional maps plus graphs and tables for all sites), it is essential that the report  be searchable by site or group of sites, and by data summary or display approach.

 

The remainder of this scope of work is a description of the various sections of the report including suggested standard statistical and graphical summaries.

 

 

 

Report Contents and Organization:

  1. Background section
    1. Text describing the objectives and approach of the report
    2. Text describing the structure and uses of the report
    3. Map of WRAP area with various monitoring sites cross-referenced to a table of sites and class I areas they represent
    4. References to sites, monitoring, and data processing meta-files and other web site data and tools that can be used to better understand material presented in this report
  2. WRAP-regional maps (contours with values shown) and site-specific summary tables and pie diagrams for annual and quarterly (i.e. by calendar quarters) mean values
    1. Brief introductory text and figure and table captions (including aerosol extinction algorithms) for the following
    2. Fine and coarse mass concentrations
    3. Fine mass species concentrations and fractions of total calculated mass
    4. Aerosol calculated extinction – total and by each component amounts and fractions
    5. Aerosol calculated haze levels in deciview
  3. Best and worst 20% calculated extinction days for each site
    1. Brief introductory text and figure and table captions for the following
    2. Stacked bar plots of extinction contributions across the year (i.e. those of Debbie Miller)
    3. Contour maps of best and worst day deciview values & aerosol species contributions to extinction
    4. Truth table of sites verse sample dates indicating best and worst days so regions and seasons of common best and worst can be identified
    5. Meteorological conditions corresponding to the most common best and worst days 

                                                              i.      HISPLIT trajectories (or other method) to show flow,

                                                            ii.      Other meteorological descriptors that might be helpful like precipitation, position with respect to pressure features, temperature, humidity, etc.

                                                          iii.      This would be limited to about 10 each best and worst most common days use as examples – readers encouraged to do more of the same for their favorite days and locations

    1. Year-to-year haze trends (deciview) and components of extinction trends  [Ultimately we want this section to contain trends analysis of the 5-year averages as required by the Regional Haze Rule.]
  1. Retrospective summary report – A one time only report of data preceding January 2000 using the tools developed as described above in numbers 2 and 3 will be generated for all of the current sites that have complete (all 4 IMPROVE channels) aerosol speciation multi-year data prior to January 2000.