WRF-CHEM real time simultaneous prediction of air quality and weather

The multiscale air pollution prediction system used here is based on the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model which is coupled with the RACM chemical mechanism. In addition, biogenic and anthropogenic emissions, deposition, convective and turbulent chemical transport, photolysis, and advective chemical transport are all treated simulataneously with the meteorology ("online"). A more detailed description of the model can be found here.

Two forecasts are run twice a day (40 vertically stretched levels):

A 36 km air quality forecast runs out to 72, or 36 h with 3 h forecast intervals.
A 27 km air quality forecast runs out to 48 h with 3 h forecast intervals (experimental inclusion of biomass burning).

36 km WRF-CHEM air quality and weather forecast

This model is run on ESRL's 64-bit supercomputer. Meteorological initial conditions come from ESRL's RUC model and boundary conditions are generated from NCEP's WRF forecasts. For air quality forecasts, the chemistry fields produced by a previous 12 h forecast are used to initiallize each new 36-hour forecast. Anthropogenic emissions data are from an improved EPA NEI-99 (National Emissions Inventory, 1999) data set including some recent updates and have been prepared for the model by Stu McKeen of the NOAA Chemical Sciences Division.

36 km grid spacing times:

27 km WRF-CHEM air quality and weather forecast

This model is run on ESRL's 64-bit supercomputer. Meteorological initial conditions come from ESRL's RUC model and boundary conditions are generated from NCEP's WRF forecasts just as the 36-km forecast. Likewise, the anthropogenic emissions data comes from the updated NEI-99 data set. The key addition with this forecast is the inclusion of fire emissions. (This work was done in cooperation with CPTEC, Brazil and ARSC, Fairbanks, AK.) Fire, or biomass burning, data is obtained from the GOES WF-ABBA satellite data made available from the "Cooperative Institute for Meteorological Satellite Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

27 km grid spacing - including biomass burning - times:

This page developed by Bill Moninger and Randy Collander.
The real-time air quality prediction experiment is set up and run by Georg Grell and Steven Peckham.
Last modified: Friday, 18 Jul 2008