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LINKING THE CMAQ AND HYSPLIT MODELING SYSTEM INTERFACE PROGRAM AND EXAMPLE APPLICATION
Citation:
GODOWITCH, J. M. AND R. R. DRAXLER. LINKING THE CMAQ AND HYSPLIT MODELING SYSTEM INTERFACE PROGRAM AND EXAMPLE APPLICATION. Presented at 5th Annual CMAS Conference, Chapel Hill, NC, October 16 - 18, 2006.
Impact/Purpose:
The framework of accountability is based on measuring environmental outcomes using an integrated environmental assessment model - - assessing and documenting relationships between emissions, air quality, atmospheric deposition, and effects to public health and ecosystems. Work in AMD will focus on relating changes in emissions to changes in environmental conditions prospectively, and the retrospective attribution of observable improvements in environmental conditions to specific emission control strategies.
1.Emission reductions observed in ambient air and atmospheric deposition
Since the 1990 Clean Air Act Amendments, a greater number of stationary sources of SO2 and NOx emissions have installed continuous emissions monitoring systems. Improved systems for tracking emissions from mobile sources have also been developed. At this level, an accountability framework provides a bridge between measured emission reductions and changes in the ambient environment. Resources under this initiative would be applied to analyze specific primary and transformed emission products in ambient air and in atmospheric deposition (e.g., nitrogen oxide, particle nitrate) over relevant geographic areas.
2.Predicted air quality and atmospheric deposition improvements
Resources would be applied to enhance the predictive capability to address whether emissions reductions have resulted in the expected improvements in air quality and deposition, for example:
Reduced ozone, PM2.5 concentrations
Reduced deposition of NOx transformations (e.g., wet and dry deposition of nitrate)
Diagnostic species (e.g., peroxides, nitric acid, ammonia) useful for model evaluations and interpreting dynamic changes in the atmosphere associated emissions reductions
In addition to assessing whether the improvements have occurred, this would also entail assessing whether these improvements can be attributed to specific emission control strategies.This team's objective is to research and develop analytical tools that will quantify the effect of regional NOx emission reductions on ambient air quality, thus providing a measure of control stategy accountability.
Description:
A new software tool has been developed to link the Eulerian-based Community Multiscale Air Quality (CMAQ) modeling system with the Lagrangian-based HYSPLIT (HYbrid Single-Particle Lagrangian Integrated Trajectory) model. Both models require many of the same hourly meteorological parameter fields in their applications, however, their meteorological input data files exhibit different formats and data structures. This paper describes the MCIP2ARL interface program, which was designed to retrieve the key meteorological fields required by HYSPLIT from CMAQ's MCIP (Meteorology-Chemistry Interface Processor) data files. It generates a HYSPLIT-compatible input data file, which permits analyses of various CMAQ results within HYSPLIT's Lagrangian trajectory framework. An example application is discussed. Results of CMAQ simulated concentrations along HYSPLIT trajectory paths are also presented.