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“Towards building better linkages between aqueous phase chemistry and microphysics in CMAQ”
Citation:
Fahey, K., David-C Wong, Bill Hutzell, S. Yu, AND Jon Pleim. “Towards building better linkages between aqueous phase chemistry and microphysics in CMAQ”. CMAS Conference, Chapel Hill, NC, October 28 - 30, 2013.
Impact/Purpose:
The National Exposure Research Laboratory (NERL) Atmospheric Modeling and Analysis Division (AMAD) conducts research in support of EPA mission to protect human health and the environment. AMAD research program is engaged in developing and evaluating predictive atmospheric models on all spatial and temporal scales for forecasting the air quality and for assessing changes in air quality and air pollutant exposures, as affected by changes in ecosystem management and regulatory decisions. AMAD is responsible for providing a sound scientific and technical basis for regulatory policies based on air quality models to improve ambient air quality. The models developed by AMAD are being used by EPA, NOAA, and the air pollution community in understanding and forecasting not only the magnitude of the air pollution problem, but also in developing emission control policies and regulations for air quality improvements.
Description:
Currently, CMAQ’s aqueous phase chemistry routine (AQCHEM-base) assumes Henry’s Law equilibrium and employs a forward Euler method to solve a small set of oxidation equations, considering the additional processes of aitken scavenging and wet deposition in series and employing a bisection method to calculate H+ concentrations. With potentially hundreds of reactions that may be important in cloud water and only seven reactions in the current model, expansion of the existing mechanism is an important area of investigation. However, with the current mechanism hardwired into the solver code, the module is difficult to expand with additional chemistry. It also ignores the impacts of mass transfer limitations on cloud chemistry which may be significant. Here, the Kinetic PreProcessor has been applied to generate a Rosenbrock solver for the CMAQ v5.0.1 aqueous phase chemistry mechanism. The module has been updated to simultaneously solve kinetic mass transfer between the phases, dissociation/association, chemical kinetics, Aitken scavenging, and wet deposition. This will allow for easier expansion of the chemical mechanism in the future and a better link between aqueous phase chemistry and droplet microphysics.