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FEST-C v1.4: An integrated agriculture, atmosphere, and hydrology modeling system for ecosystem assessments
Citation:
Ran, L., E. Cooter, D. Yang, Y. Yuan, V. Benson, J. Williams, Jon Pleim, Keith Wyat Appel, R. Wang, A. Hanna, V. Garcia, AND R. Mathur. FEST-C v1.4: An integrated agriculture, atmosphere, and hydrology modeling system for ecosystem assessments. 2018 CMAS Annual Conference, Chapel Hill, NC, October 22 - 24, 2018.
Impact/Purpose:
This integrated modeling system enables EPA’s Program Offices who regulate different media to work together to address current issues as well as to anticipate consequences of changes in future social, economic and environmental conditions on nutrient pollution. The impact of this research on the protection of fresh and marine environments anywhere in the U.S. that excess nutrients may be of concern has been realized directly through contributions to the Chesapeake Bay Program Office/Region 3 TMDL process, the refinement of the Office of Water HAWQS tool, and through reducing atmospheric N deposition estimate uncertainty (contributions to the OAR/OAQPS 2017 National Emissions Inventory and NADP analyses) and the EPA Second Triennial Report to Congress on Biofuels and the Environment.
Description:
We have developed an agricultural modeling system using the Fertilizer Emission Scenario Tool for CMAQ (FEST-C) and Environmental Policy Integrated Climate (EPIC) agricultural cropping model for any defined conterminous United States CMAQ domain and grid resolution. Integrated with the WRF/CMAQ meteorology and air quality models, the system simulates plant growth, fertilization, production, hydrology, and complete soil biogeochemical properties under various management practices. The system was originally designed for generating required input for CMAQ simulations 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 release of FEST-C V1.4 in July 2018. FEST-C v1.4 is enhanced to better integrate the Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT) modeling system with EPIC and WRF/CMAQ output for improving our understanding of hypoxia in the Gulf of Mexico and other applications. These enhancements have advanced the system 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. Therefore, it is important to evaluate all modeling components in this newly released integrated system in order to understand their strengths and identify issues for future improvements and applications. We will present the updates and enhancements on the interface and EPIC model in FEST-C v1.4. The presentation will focus on evaluating simulated yields and nitrogen fertilization from EPIC against USDA and USGS reports. We will also present and evaluate simulated NH3 flux and NH4+ wet deposition for 2011 by CMAQ v5.3 with a new bi-directional NH3 flux model which is directly coupled with EPIC. Simulated runoff and water quality by the integrated modeling system in the Mississippi River Basin will also be presented to demonstrate the capability of FEST-C V1.4 for facilitating hydrology and water quality assessment.
