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Enhancements to an Agriculture-land Modeling System - FEST-C and Its Applications
Citation:
Cooter, E., L. Ran, V. Benson, D. Yang, J. Bash, R. Wang, AND Y. Yuan. Enhancements to an Agriculture-land Modeling System - FEST-C and Its Applications. 2016 CMAS Conference, Chapel Hill, NC, October 24 - 26, 2016.
Impact/Purpose:
The National Exposure Research Laboratory (NERL) Computational Exposure Division (CED) develops and evaluates data, decision-support tools, and models to be applied to media-specific or receptor-specific problem areas. CED uses modeling-based approaches to characterize exposures, evaluate fate and transport, and support environmental diagnostics/forensics with input from multiple data sources. It also develops media- and receptor-specific models, process models, and decision support tools for use both within and outside of EPA.
Description:
The Fertilizer Emission Scenario Tool for CMAQ (FEST-C) system was originally developed to simulate daily fertilizer application information using the Environmental Policy Integrated Climate (EPIC) model across any defined CMAQ conterminous United States (U.S.) CMAQ domain and grid resolution. This EPIC output information is a required input for CMAQ modeling with the bi-directional NH3 option. Since the first release of FEST-C v1.0 in October 2013, the system has gone through many updates and enhancements up to the recent update release of FEST-C V1.2 in May 2016. As part of this process, the system has been adapted to support applications for air quality studies using CMAQ with the bi-directional NH3 option in China. We have also developed methods to support scenarios of agricultural land management change, i.e., reallocating grid-cell agricultural land amongst specific crops in response to hypothetical economic and policy changes. Currently, we are enhancing the system to better integrate bidirectional CMAQ air quality simulations with the Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT) modeling system to improve our understanding of hypoxia in the Gulf of Mexico. These enhancements have advanced FEST-C capabilities from simply supporting CMAQ simulations, to becoming a valuable tool for integrated, one-biosphere assessments of air, land and water quality in light of social drivers and human and ecological outcomes.This presentation will focus on demonstrating system enhancements since the version 1 release. We will also present results illustrating China air quality simulations, SWAT integration and agricultural cropland reallocation.
