Comparative analysis of meteorological performance of coupled chemistry-meteorology models in the context of AQMEII phase 2

Abstract

Date of Acceptance: 12/12/2014 Copyright The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/)Air pollution simulations critically depend on the quality of the underlying meteorology. In phase 2 of the Air Quality Model Evaluation International Initiative (AQMEII-2), thirteen modeling groups from Europe and four groups from North America operating eight different regional coupled chemistry and meteorology models participated in a coordinated model evaluation exercise. Each group simulated the year 2010 for a domain covering either Europe or North America or both. Here were present an operational analysis of model performance with respect to key meteorological variables relevant for atmospheric chemistry processes and air quality. These parameters include temperature and wind speed at the surface and in the vertical profile, incoming solar radiation at the ground, precipitation, and planetary boundary layer heights. A similar analysis was performed during AQMEII phase 1 (Vautard etal., 2012) for offline air quality models not directly coupled to the meteorological model core as the model systems investigated here. Similar to phase 1, we found significant overpredictions of 10-m wind speeds by most models, more pronounced during night than during daytime. The seasonal evolution of temperature was well captured with monthly mean biases below 2K over all domains. Solar incoming radiation, precipitation and PBL heights, on the other hand, showed significant spread between models and observations suggesting that major challenges still remain in the simulation of meteorological parameters relevant for air quality and for chemistry-climate interactions at the regional scale

Application of an Online-Coupled Regional Climate Model, WRF-CAM5, over East Asia for Examination of Ice Nucleation Schemes: Part I. Comprehensive Model Evaluation and Trend Analysis for 2006 and 2011

“…As a result, the model agreement with observations is not expected to be comparable with simulations that use FDDA. The annual mean MBs of T2 are larger than the suggested threshold values by Emery et al ([49]) but they are comparable or even better than the performance using MM5 (e.g., [44,50]) and WRF (e.g., [47,48,51,52]), and hence deemed acceptable.…”

“…The largest discrepancy between the observed and simulated T2 occurs in summer with seasonal mean MBs of −1. over Europe ( [48]). This is because the Monin-Obukhov surface layer scheme ( [18,19]) can represent surface roughness and topographical features well, which leads to better representation of surface drag in the Bretherton and Park ( [20]) PBL scheme used in this work than that used in the YSU PBL scheme used in most previous WRF/Chem applications.…”

Insights into the deterministic skill of air quality ensembles from the analysis of AQMEII data

“…Refer to Solazzo et al (2012a, b) (2012) and Vautard et al (2012). For 2010 (AQMEII-II), similar information is presented in Pouliot et al (2015), and Brunner et al (2015).…”

“…rological analysis. In AQMEII-II, the simulations were run more in a way as if they were real forecasts; meteorological boundary conditions for the majority of the models were from the ECMWF operational archive (see Tables 1 and 2 in Brunner et al, 2015), and no nudging or FDDA (fourdimensional data assimilation) was applied. However, the driving meteorological data were analysis (but no reanalysis) for all simulations, with exception of the COSMO-MUSCAT run.…”

Estudio de modelización on-line del efecto directo de los aerosoles atmosféricos sobre Europa

“…As an extensive model evaluation for the meteorological variables and particulate is presented by Brunner et al (2015) and Im et al (2015), the scope of this paper is limited to the discussion of the impact of aerosol-meteorology feedback effects due to the direct effect.…”