Two new resources for estimating wind speed and direction have recently been made available to the NOVAC community. Wind information is essential for converting measured sulfur dioxide burdens to volcanic emission rates.
For real-time emission rate estimates, wind forecast data from the NOAA Global Forecast System (GFS) are uploaded to the ‘Wind’ directory on the NOVAC sftp server. Files in this directory contain forecast conditions for the next 7 days. These data can be loaded automatically by the NOVAC Program such that the calculation of real-time sulfur dioxide emission rates is based on these wind forecasts.
In addition, historical (2005-2021) wind information from the ECMWF ERA5 model are now available in the ‘ecmwf’ directory on the NOVAC sftp server. These data provide a higher temporal and spatial resolution than data from the GFS, and are thus ideal for re-analyses of sulfur dioxide emission rates.
For more information on the use of these resources, please contact the NOVAC software working group.