URBAN ATMOSPHERIC OBSERVATORY (UAO) FIRST PLANNING WORKSHOP, JANUARY 27-28-2003. WORKSHOP SUMMARY.

The Urban Atmospheric Observatory (UAO) First Planning Workshop was held on 27-28 January 2003 at the Environmental Measurements Laboratory (EML) in downtown Manhattan, New York City. The meeting was well attended by local, state, and national administrators, as well as scientists and engineers from the national laboratories and academia. The real-time intensive UAO is a necessary step toward the development and validation of new technologies in support of the New York City emergency management and anti-terrorism effort. The real-time intensive UAO will be a dense array of meteorological instrumentation, remote sensing and satellite products and model output, as well as radiation detection, gamma spectrometer and aerosol measurements focused onto a small area in the heart of Manhattan. Such a test-bed, developed in a somewhat homogeneous urban area, and with a well-developed communication and data collection backbone, will be of immense utility for understanding how models of all scales can be improved and how they can best be integrated into the city's emergency program. The goal of the First Planning Workshop was to bring together a small group of experts in the fields of urban meteorology, modeling from mesoscale to fine-mesh computational fluid dynamics, instrumentation, communications and visualization, in order to (1) establish the importance of the observational program, (2) define the most efficient and cost-effective design for the program, (3) define needed intensive observational efforts and establish a schedule, and (4) define the importance of the UAO in emergency operations. The workshop achieved its goals with the enthusiastic participation of over forty persons. There was a synthesis of ideas towards a world-class facility that would benefit both immediate emergency management activities and, over an extended time, the entire field of urban meteorology and contaminant dispersion modeling