How one U.S. Army program changed the forecast in emergency preparedness
Refining emergency preparedness
Michael Myirski wasn’t your typical meteorologist. Before retiring from the federal government in 2017, he spent 36 years helping the Army refine emergency preparedness weather capabilities into a sophisticated, state-of-the-art program.
With physicist Glen Whitacre, who retired in 1989, Myirski took on the Army’s challenge of estimating hazards associated with possible accidents at the eight U.S. chemical stockpile storage locations in the nation at the time. A key component is predicting how fast chemical agent could evaporate and the concentration of agent. The concept, called dispersion meteorology, involves “trying to understand the behavior of the atmosphere in the lowest levels near the surface, and how chemical agent will react and disperse in that atmosphere,†Myirski said.
http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/maryland/harford/aegis/ph-ag-xcomm-emergency-preparedness-20180510-story.html
