Besides defining surface characteristics, the user provides several files of hourly meteorological data for processing by AERMET. At the present time AERMET is designed to accept data from any for the following sources: 1) standard hourly National Weather Service (NWS) data from the most representative site; 2) morning soundings of winds, temperature, and dew point from the nearest NWS upper air station; and 3) on-site wind, temperature, turbulence, pressure, and radiation measurements (if available).
The minimum measured and/or derived data needed to run the AERMOD modeling system are as follows: