Using Nevron Charts for .NET, we offer web-site visitors a means to graph data accumulated ina database of observed and model-predicted data on air quality

AIRPACT-3: Air Quality Forecast System
AIRPACT-3 is an automated numerical computation system for predicting air quality for theimmediate future of one to three days for Idaho, Oregon and Washington. The system runs
daily to predict ozone, particulates, and other pollutants in the Pacific Northwest from bothanthropogenic and biogenic sources.
Laboratory for Atmospheric Research
Department of Civil and Environmental EngineeringWashington State University
The Laboratory for Atmospheric Research (LAR) is part of the Department of Civil andEnvironmental Engineering at Washington State University (WSU). The LAR is a multidisciplinary group focused on air-quality graduate education and research. For more
information, visit http://lar.wsu.edu.
Project Industry: Education / Research / Academia
Project type: Atmospheric Science Research / Web

AIRPACT-3 predicts air quality by calculating the chemistry and physics of air pollutants asdetermined by pollutant emissions within the context of the background, natural airchemistry and predicted meteorology. AIRPACT's project name, the Air Information Reportfor Public Access and Community Tracking, reflects the goal of bringing meaningful
information on the quality of the air (or the level of air pollutants) to the public from avariety of sources, including both model results and monitoring stations.
Using Nevron Charts, we offer web-site visitors a means to graph data accumulated in a
database of observed and model-predicted data on air quality in order to evaluate modelperformance.

Challenges include coordinating incoming data streams (i.e., the two data sources: hourly
air-quality observations and model simulation data), developing efficient strategies forjoining the two data sets, and graphically and statistically comparing the results fornumerous air monitoring stations across the northwestern U.S. in near real-time.

The regional air-quality monitoring and forecasting community requires a variety ofgraphical tools to analyze model performance. Colleagues at the Puget Sound Clean Air
Agency in Seattle, WA—who use a trend-graphing tool developed with Nevron Charts togenerate plots of pollutant and meteorological data—recommended Nevron Charts to ourresearch group as a means to visually display model performance on the Internet, thus
addressing one of our project objectives, that of providing graphical results to downstream
product users.

Development time was approximately 5 months, with one developer having no previous
Visual Basic or Nevron Chart experience.

Currently, we are using Nevron Chart for .NET to produce multiple, time-series line plots
comparing air quality observations with model predictions. Users can select which
pollutant and monitoring station to plot, along with the date range of interest. Chart axes
are auto scalable, and the charts use data-binding and auto-post-back for dynamicallygenerated graphs. Through time, we hope to expand the use of Nevron Chart tools in ourair-quality and climate research.

Laboratory for Atmospheric Research
Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering
Washington State University
http://lar.wsu.edu/

The development environment is Microsoft Windows XP and Windows Server 2003.
Some UNIX preprocessing is required, before importing the data into a Microsoft SQL
Server 2005 database. The final web application is assembled with Microsoft VisualStudio 2005.

Project URL: http://lar.wsu.edu/airpact-3/performance.html