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OVERVIEW OF THE CLIMATE IMPACT ON REGIONAL AIR QUALITY (CIRAQ) PROJECT
Citation:
Cooter, E J., A B. Gilliland, W G. Benjey, AND R Gilliam. OVERVIEW OF THE CLIMATE IMPACT ON REGIONAL AIR QUALITY (CIRAQ) PROJECT. Presented at 2004 Models-3 Conference, Chapel Hill, NC, October 18-20, 2004.
Impact/Purpose:
The objective of this work is to investigate the impact of global climate change on the regional air quality of the United States. Impacts of climate change on meteorological patterns and primary source emissions are investigated as primary elements influencing future air quality.
Description:
The Climate Impacts on Regional Air Quality (CIRAQ) project will develop model-estimated impacts of global climate changes on ozone and particulate matter (PM) in direct support of the USEPA Global Change Research Program's (GCRP) national air quality assessment. EPA's urban/regional Community Multiscale Air Quality (CMAQ) model will be used to explore the influence of global climate change on U.S. air quality in the mid-term of about 50 years. The planned products for this effort are designed to provide results and analysis for the USEPA GCRP 2007 air quality assessment report. The CIRAQ project is made up of three major components: (1) regional climate scenarios, (2) emissions scenarios, and (3) air quality modeling. Regional climate simulations using MM5 with initial and boundary conditions from the NAS GISS Global Climate Model (GCM) will be performed for reference and future periods under climate change conditions. The RCM results will be processed into "model-ready" meteorology input for the current and future CMAQ simulations. The RCM results will then be analyzed prior to performing the CMAQ simulations. These analyses will be presented in conjunction with the CMAQ results to better understand the air quality predictions in light of meteorological forcing. Current and future emissions scenarios will be based on the most recent 2001 modeling inventory version prepared for the Office of Air Quality Planning and Standards (OAQPS). The inventory will be reprocessed using the RCM simulations for temperature-dependent emissions such as biogenics and mobile emissions. Using the base emissions, multi-year continental domain CMAQ simulations will be performed for the first incremental phase of the project, where climate change forcing is tested without future anthropogenic emissions. Future climate change simulations will be compared against the current CMAQ simulations and results will be provided to the USEPA GCRP national assessment in 2007.
The research presented here was performed under the Memorandum of Understanding between the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and U.S. Department of Commerce's National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and under agreement number DW13921548. Although it has been reviewed by EPA and NOAA and approved for publication, it does not necessarily reflect their policies or views.