New statistical procedures to evaluate the Models-3/Community Multiscale Air Quality (CMAQ) using observed data are introduced. Certain space-time correlations are used to assess dynamic aspects of CMAQ and to compare the space-time structure of CMAQ to that of observations. Our analyses show that, overall, CMAQ matches the space-time correlation structure of observed sulfate concentrations wel...

Abstract. The latest operational National Air Quality Forecast Capability (NAQFC) has been advanced to use the Community Multiscale (CMAQ) model (version 5.3.1) with CB6r3 (Carbon Bond 6 revision 3) AERO7 7 of aerosol module) chemical mechanism and is driven by Finite-Volume Cubed-Sphere (FV3) Global System, version 16 (GFSv16). This update accomplished via development meteorological preprocess...

Plume rise is the height smoke plumes can reach. This information is needed by air quality models such as the Community Multiscale Air Quality (CMAQ) model to simulate physical and chemical processes of point-source fire emissions. This study seeks to understand the importance of plume rise to CMAQ air quality simulation of prescribed burning to plume rise. CMAQ simulations are compared between...

This paper presents a mechanistic, fully dynamic, internally mixed, sectional aerosol module, the UCD Aerosol Module, which evolves from the Aerosol Inorganic Model (AIM). The UCD Aerosol Module employs three gas-to-particle mass transport schemes, replacement, coupled and uncoupled, and simplified aerosol thermodynamics to predict gas–particle partitioning, aerosol phase state and water conten...

Bayesian statistical methods are used to evaluate Community Multiscale Air Quality (CMAQ) model simulations of sulfate aerosol over a section of the eastern US for 4-week periods in summer and winter 2001. The observed data come from two U.S. Environmental Protection Agency data collection networks. The statistical methods used here address two problems that arise in model evaluation: the spars...

An adjoint model for the internationally used Community Multiscale Air Quality (CMAQ) modeling platform of the U.S. EPA is developed. The adjoint version for CMAQ (CMAQ-ADJ) provides the user community with forward (decoupled direct method or DDM) and backward (adjoint) sensitivity analysis capabilities. Current implementation is for gas-phase processes. Discrete adjoints are implemented for al...

[1] Nowadays none of the operational daily forecasts in Europe includes the influence of Saharan dust on a nonclimatic basis. In order to account for this, the BSC-CNS currently operates daily photochemical forecasts in the Iberian Peninsula with MM5-EMEP-CMAQ modelling system and Saharan dust forecasts over Southern Europe with Eta/ DREAM. The necessity of coupling both modelling systems is ad...

In the past decades, continuous efforts have been made at a national level to reduce Nitrogen Dioxide (NO2) emissions in the atmosphere over China. However, public concern and related research mostly deal with tropospheric NO2 columns rather than ground-level NO2 concentrations, but actually ground-level NO2 concentrations are more closely related to anthropogenic emissions, and directly affect...

An integral part of air quality management is knowledge of the impact of pollutant sources on ambient concentrations of particulate matter (PM). There is also a growing desire to directly use source impact estimates in health studies; however, source impacts cannot be directly measured. Several limitations are inherent in most source apportionment methods motivating the development of a novel h...