The intent was both as an aid to forecasting as well as helping to understand lake breeze mechanisms and climatology. The latter are critically dependent upon wind direction for operational runways and require as detailed forecasting as possible for smooth transitions due to lake breeze passages. These sites are all at least 200 km away from the area of interest and have data available only for the standard 00 UTC and 12 UTC reporting times. While model output appeared to work reasonably well given these restrictions, sometimes the forecasts were unrealistic because the lake breeze is very sensitive to the speed and direction of the background wind. This consumed a great deal of initial resources and time.
Output is available via the Internet.
Given the experimental nature of the methodology, access to model output is restricted to sites in the NWS Central Region. In the course of doing this work a few model adjustments were made to enhance the quality of the results. One of these was the need to smooth out boundary layer wind profiles to compensate for the nocturnal accelerations that occur due to surface inversions. Increases in nocturnal wind speeds near the top of the surface inversion translate into an unrealistically strong geostrophic wind that alters the characteristics of the ambient background flow upon which the lake breeze later interacts. Smoothing of the wind profile reflects the mixing that would occur with daytime heating and better reflects the real environment later in the day.