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Fine-scale meteorological modeling of the land-sea breeze circulation of Long Island Sound and surrounding coastal areas
Citation:
Gilliam, R., A. Torres-Vazquez, AND J. Pleim. Fine-scale meteorological modeling of the land-sea breeze circulation of Long Island Sound and surrounding coastal areas. 2019 CMAS Conference, Chapel Hill, North Carolina, October 21 - 23, 2019.
Impact/Purpose:
Regions of the US continue to experience episodes of high ozone that exceed the current National Ambient Air Quality Standards (NAAQS). One of these regions are areas surrounding the Long Island Sound including Long Island, New York City and coastal Connecticut. This study seeks to exercise the state-of-science WRF and CMAQ models to better understand the dynamics and chemistry behind these episodes, and how well our current modeling systems characterize the air quality and meteorology. Studies like these also work to improve our model via more rigorous evaluation because of the extensive field measurements that are normally not available.
Description:
In 2018, a comprehensive field study was conducted to examine the tropospheric ozone around the New York City area. The Long Island Sound Tropospheric Ozone Study (LISTOS) is a collaborative (Federal, State and Academia) observational campaign with modeling support, to better understand the processes behind what continues to be high observed surface ozone in the region. The main factors behind these high ozone episodes are the fact that the area has such high population and it has a unique coastline geography. Anthropogenic emissions are proportional to the sizable population and local land-sea circulations are driven by land-water temperature contrast and coastal geography. Local sea and land breeze circulations tend to recirculate pollution. Ozone and other pollutants have a tendency to concentrate along sea breeze fronts that align over high population areas and over adjacent bodies of water that remain stable with little vertical mixing. In this research we attempt to model this problem at a 1.33 km scale using the coupled WRF-CMAQ modeling system. The focus here is the performance of the WRF model in terms of replicating the land-sea breeze circulation. We present an overview of model performance for the LISTOS study period and a more in-depth evaluation for specific high ozone days. We use routine observations as well as more detailed observations from the field campaign for this evaluation.