LAPS was developed by NOAA's Forecast Systems Laboratory in Boulder, CO. LAPS can produce high-resolution real-time analyses and short-term forecasts of local surface and upper air atmospheric conditions. LAPS incorporates multiple types of data from both traditional and non-traditional observing platforms. It is this usage of a wide-range of local data sources and high resolution that gives LAPS an advantage over more coarse, large-scale atmospheric models.

The prediction products of LAPS are generated by using the LAPS gridded analysis of raw data as the initial conditions to a meso-scale atmospheric forecast model such the Penn State/NCAR mesoscale model (MM5), the Regional Atmospheric Modeling System (RAMS), or the workstation version of NCEP's Eta model.

LAPS is run in National Weather Service Forecast Offices (WFOs) and covers domains roughly the size of the WFO's county warning area. FSL began to run LAPS at the Denver WFO in 1991. Since then several other LAPS implementations have occurred. Most notably, LAPS provided weather support to the 1996 Olympic Games in Atlanta, GA.

CSDL has implemented LAPS for the Narragansett Bay in Southern New England and the Chesapeake Bay to determine the reliability and accuracy of LAPS analyses for use by NOS' estuarine forecast systems.

More information about LAPS can be found at http://laps.fsl.noaa.gov.

Revised Thursday April 04 2002by OCS Webmaster