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A COMPARISON OF AEROSOL OPTICAL DEPTH SIMULATED USING CMAQ WITH SATELLITE ESTIMATES
Citation:
ROY, B., R. MATHUR, JIM SZYKMAN, A. GILLILAND, AND C. KITTAKA. A COMPARISON OF AEROSOL OPTICAL DEPTH SIMULATED USING CMAQ WITH SATELLITE ESTIMATES. Presented at 2005 A&WMA Annual Conference, Minneapolis, MN, June 21 - 25, 2005.
Impact/Purpose:
The objective of this task is to thoroughly characterize the performance of the emissions, meteorological and chemical/transport modeling components of the Models-3 system, with an emphasis on the chemical/transport model, CMAQ. Emissions-based models are composed of highly complex scientific hypotheses concerning natural processes that can be evaluated through comparison with observations, but not truly validated. Static and Dynamic Operational, Diagnostic, and ultimately Probablistic evaluation methods are needed to both establish credibility and build confidence within the client and scientific community in the simulations results for policy and scientific applications. The characterization of the performance of Models-3/CMAQ is also a tool for the model developers to identify aspects of the modeling system that require further improvement.
Description:
Satellite data provide new opportunities to study the regional distribution of particulate matter.
The aerosol optical depth (AOD) - a derived estimate from the satellite-measured radiance, can be compared against model estimates to provide an evaluation of the columnar aerosol distributions simulated by the air quality models. In this study, we inter-compare the modeled AOD data computed using three different methods. The first two are empirical approaches whereas the third method uses a parametric approximation to Mie extinction.