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Impacts of Horizontal Spacing on Large-Scale Northern Hemispheric CMAQ Modelling
Citation:
Sidi, F., R. Mathur, C. Hogrefe, J. Pleim, R. Gilliam, D. Kang, Ben Murphy, G. Sarwar, J. Willison, AND D. Wong. Impacts of Horizontal Spacing on Large-Scale Northern Hemispheric CMAQ Modelling. International Technical Meeting on Air Pollution Modelling and its Application 2024, Copenhagen, DENMARK, October 14 - 18, 2024. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-032-02971-3_11
Impact/Purpose:
Simulations with the WRF CMAQ system are conducted at two different horizontal resolutions (108 km and 36 km) on the Northern Hemispheric domain to asses the impacts of grid resolution of large scale forcings.
Description:
To better characterize how increasing numerical accuracy translates to improvements in large-scale forcing’s over the Northern Hemisphere, two CMAQ simulations with differing grid spacing (108 km versus 36 km) will be compared for the year 2019 using the EPA’s Air QUAlity TimE Series (EQUATES; US (Foley et al. Data Brief 47:109022) modelling platform. When model simulations are evaluated against various surface, aloft, and remote sensing observations, it is found that both simulations produce similar large-scale forcing’s. However, in regions of complex terrain or weather (e.g., dust storms, intrusion events, convection). Some localized differences are seen. But the gains in increasing numerical accuracy must be weighted against the additional computational resources required to simulate with finer grid spacing (e.g., the 36 km simulation required significantly more computational resources than the 108 km simulation). This indicates that the gains in representing large-scale air pollution forcing through improvements in numerical accuracy via grid spacing improvements may not outweigh the computational cost.
URLs/Downloads:
DOI: Impacts of Horizontal Spacing on Large-Scale Northern Hemispheric CMAQ Modelling
https://itm2024.vito.be/en