A full year evaluation of the CALIOPE-EU air quality modeling system over Europe for 2004

Abstract

The CALIOPE-EU high-resolution air quality modeling system, namely WRF-ARW/HERMES-EMEP/CMAQ/BSC-DREAM8b, is developed and applied to Europe (12 km × 12 km, 1hr). The model performances are tested in terms of air quality levels and dynamics reproducibility on a yearly basis. The present work describes a quantitative evaluation of gas phase species (O 3 , NO 2 and SO 2 ) and particulate matter (PM2.5 and PM10) against ground-based measurements from the EMEP (European Monitoring and Evaluation Programme) network for the year 2004. The evaluation is based on statistics. Simulated O 3 achieves satisfactory performances for both daily mean and daily maximum concentrations, especially in summer, with annual mean correlations of 0.66 and 0.69, respectively. Mean normalized errors are comprised within the recommendations proposed by the United States Environmental Protection Agency (US-EPA). The general trends and daily variations of primary pollutants (NO 2 and SO 2 ) are satisfactory. Daily mean concentrations of NO 2 correlate well with observations (annual correlation r=0.67) but tend to be underestimated. For SO 2 , mean concentrations are well simulated (mean bias=0.5 µg m −3 ) with relatively high annual mean correlation (r=0.60), although peaks are generally overestimated. The dynamics of PM2.5 PM2.5 and PM10 is well reproduced (0.49 < r < 0.62), but mean concentrations * Corresponding author.

Spatio-temporal variability of concentrations and speciation of particulate matter across Spain in the CALIOPE modeling system

“…Modeled concentrations were persistently underestimated throughout the year 2004. This underestimation is a common feature of most of the current regional models (Pay et al, 2010). The mean annual bias amounts to -21.8 µg m -3 with an annual RMSE value of 33.4 µg m -3…”

“…In the high photolytical season, the mean variability and high peaks are generally well reproduced. The modeled variability in winter months is characterized by difficulties to capture the mean trend due to inaccurate description of cross-tropopause exchanges in CMAQ (Pay et al, 2010). However, the discussion of the evaluation will mainly focus on the high O3 season (from April to September).…”

“…Chemical boundary conditions for this domain were provided by the global climate chemistry model LMDz-INCA2 (Hauglustaine et al, 2004;Folberth et al, 2006). A detailed evaluation of the European simulation was recently presented in the companion paper by Pay et al (2010). A one-way nesting was then performed to retrieve the meteorological and chemical conditions for the IP domain (see Fig.…”

“…CALIOPE ( Fig. 1) encompasses a high-resolution air quality forecasting system, namely WRF-ARW/HERMES-EMEP/CMAQ/BSC-DREAM8b, being applied to Europe as a mother domain: 12 km x12 km, 1 hr (Pay et al, 2010) as well as to Spain as the nested domain: 4 km x 4 km,1 hr. Such high resolution of the modeling system is made possible by its implementation on the MareNostrum supercomputer hosted by the Barcelona Supercomputing Center-Centro Nacional de Supercomputación (BSC-CNS).…”

Application of WRF-Chem to forecasting PM<SUB align="right">10 concentration over Poland

“…The majority of CTMs are offline models meaning that the meteorology is calculated prior to the chemistry such as CHIMEREv4.5 (Bessagnet et al, 2008;Pay et al, 2010), CMAQ (Matthias, 2008) or EMEP (Simpson et al, 2012;van Loon et al, 2007). Usually, the meteorology for these models is available at a 1 h, 3 h or 6 h resolution.…”