Discontinuation of EPA generated forecast on public air now map

Forecasting & Reporting Areas
1

Some time ago (maybe 1 or 2 years ago) the automatically generated forecasts on the AirNow.gov map were discontinued. Is there an EPA-generated forecast feed that we can use to automatically generate a forecast for Iowa reporting areas? If not, would EPA consider “resurrecting” this feature? (Not all states have the staff resources or expertise to create their own forecasts.)

2

Hi John, something your agency might consider using is the NOAA forecast model guidance. If your account has forecaster access, you can go to the Submit Forecast tab in AirNow-Tech and click Show Guidance. This will display predicted values from different NOAA forecast models. To automatically enter the forecast values in your form, you can simply click on the model name you want to use. Here are a couple of fact sheets with more information about the forecast models and about forecast submittals in general.

Forecast Model Guidance fact sheet

Forecast Submittal fact sheet

3

Thanks Meg: I tried your suggestion and it worked for me. One thing about this approach is that a human still needs to go in every day, or perhaps every other day, or every few days if conditions are not changing rapidly, and click on the model name we want to use for each reporting area.

In Iowa I currently have five “experimental” forecasts running outside of the Des Moines area that update automatically. These forecasts update daily without any human intervention by pulling in a predicted AQI number from the NOAA Bias-Corrected ozone and PM2.5 models. A disadvantage of this approach is that it provides a forecast for today only. The forecast for tomorrow is “greyed out”. (Quite a few states have a forecast for today, but their forecast for tomorrow is “greyed out”. For example: Vermont, and parts of Oregon and California.)

I am not aware of any way to develop a ​two day forecast using this fully automated approach. Is there a way to generate a forecast for both today and tomorrow using a fully automated approach?

4

Hi John,

There’s currently no way to automate this option in AirNow-Tech, but we will keep this in mind as we plan for system changes for the future.