What are the differences between HYSPLIT and FlexPart?

[bastoumeteoo]

Hi all,

I've started a PhD 3 month ago about combined effect of wildfires and heatwaves on human health.

I'm interested in atmospheric dispersion models that can represent smoke plume trajectories, such as FlexPart, HYSPLIT, and MesoNH.

I would like to know what are the differences between HYSPLIT and FlexPart, and which one is best suited for a given situation.
If you have any articles to share, I will be happy.

Thank you,
Cheers

[alicec]

HYSPLIT and FlexPart are the same type of model - Lagrangian Atmospheric Transport and DIspersion model and have similar capabilities. If you do a literature search, you will see they have been used by the research community in very similar ways.
FlexPart is an open source model with the main development site hosted by University of Vienna.
HYSPLIT is developed and maintained by the NOAA Air Resources Laboratory.
It has been used for operational smoke forecasting at NOAA and so is certainly an appropriate choice for wildfire smoke modeling.
Additionally we have updated plume rise schemes for wildfire smoke
To get started with HYSPLIT you can,
* Try running it from the web site.
* download the appropriate executable and run it from your own machine
* go through the tutorial

https://www.ready.noaa.gov/index.php
https://www.ready.noaa.gov/documents/pp ... t_2020.pdf