Evaluation of the high resolution WRF-Chem (v3.4.1) air quality forecast and its comparison with statistical ozone predictions

Žabkar, Rahela; Honzak, Luka; Skok, Gregor; Forkel, R.; Rakovec, Jože; Ceglar, Andrej; Žagar, Nedjeljka

doi:10.5194/gmd-8-2119-2015

Cited by 29 publications

(12 citation statements)

References 72 publications

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“…Overall PM10 performances are consistent with the results obtained by other air quality forecasting systems (e.g. Honoré et al, 2008;Žabkar et al, 2015).…”

Section: Air Quality Forecasting System: Description and Setupsupporting

confidence: 88%

Evaluation of air quality forecasting system FORAIR_IT over Europe and Italy at high resolution for year 2017

Adani

Guarnieri

Vitali

et al. 2020

Preprint

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Abstract. Air pollution represents a global threat leading to large impacts on health and ecosystems and many European areas still show a poor air quality. Many measures and policies have been adopted in the past decades at European, national, regional and even local level and many tools have been developed to tackle this issue. Among these tools, the European Air Quality Directive places more emphasis on the use of models for air quality assessment and management. Within this context, air quality forecasting systems play an important role in supporting decision makers when short-term actions are required to reduce human health risks by limiting population exposure. In this framework, at European level within the Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service (CAMS), the regional air quality models participating to the service provide 4-day daily forecasts of the main atmospheric pollutants concentrations, in the lowest layers of the atmosphere. This work presents the development and the performances evaluation of FORAIR_IT, an high-resolution air quality forecasting system operating at both European (20 km) and Italian (4 km) scales. Its skill results are compared with CAMS_50 interim ensemble reanalysis (IRA) ones and a long lasting PM10 exceeding event, occurred in Emilia Romagna region in October 2017, is studied in more detail. Results show similar skill scores between FORAIT_IT and CAMS_50. Comparing the annual average of the monthly Root Mean Square Error Difference (RMSED) between FORAIT_IT first forecast day and CAMS_50, over the European domain the RMSED is 0.6, 1.7, 1.4 and 7.4 μg/m3 for daily mean PM10 and PM2.5 and daily maximum for NO2 and O3, respectively, while over the Italian domain it is 1.2, 0.3, 4.3 and 3.8 μg/m3. The importance of increasing model resolution in the region of interest is highlighted by the lower values of RMSED over Italy with respect to Europe. The results obtained by the detailed analysis of the PM10 exceeding event suggests the crucial role of the meteorological forcing in capturing both the timing and the intensity of the exceedances. As far as we know FORAIR_IT is the first forecasting system at high spatial resolution at Italian National level.

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“…Overall PM10 performances are consistent with the results obtained by other air quality forecasting systems (e.g. Honoré et al, 2008;Žabkar et al, 2015).…”

Section: Air Quality Forecasting System: Description and Setupsupporting

confidence: 88%

Evaluation of air quality forecasting system FORAIR_IT over Europe and Italy at high resolution for year 2017

Adani

Guarnieri

Vitali

et al. 2020

Preprint

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“…For a qualitative evaluation of the simulated tropospheric ozone and NO 2 columns, a comparison to satellite observations is performed. For ozone, the tropospheric ozone columns (TOCs) as described by Ziemke et al (2006) are used. For the TOCs, the stratospheric ozone columns measured by the Microwave Limb Sounder (MLS) are subtracted from the measured total ozone column of the Aura Ozone Monitoring Instrument (OMI).…”

Section: Observation Datamentioning

confidence: 99%

The 1-way on-line coupled model system MECO(n) – Part 4: Chemical evaluation (based on MESSy v2.52)

et al. 2016

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Abstract. For the first time, a simulation incorporating tropospheric and stratospheric chemistry using the newly developed MECO(n) model system is performed. MECO(n) is short for MESSy-fied ECHAM and COSMO models nested n times. It features an online coupling of the COSMO-CLM model, equipped with the Modular Earth Submodel System (MESSy) interface (called COSMO/MESSy), with the global atmospheric chemistry model ECHAM5/MESSy for Atmospheric Chemistry (EMAC). This online coupling allows a consistent model chain with respect to chemical and meteorological boundary conditions from the global scale down to the regional kilometre scale. A MECO(2) simulation incorporating one regional instance over Europe with 50 km resolution and one instance over Germany with 12 km resolution is conducted for the evaluation of MECO(n) with respect to tropospheric gas-phase chemistry. The main goal of this evaluation is to ensure that the chemistry-related MESSy submodels and the online coupling with respect to the chemistry are correctly implemented. This evaluation is a prerequisite for the further usage of MECO(n) in atmospheric chemistry-related studies. Results of EMAC and the two COSMO/MESSy instances are compared with satellite, ground-based and aircraft in situ observations, focusing on ozone, carbon monoxide and nitrogen dioxide. Further, the methane lifetimes in EMAC and the two COSMO/MESSy instances are analysed in view of the tropospheric oxidation capacity. From this evaluation, we conclude that the chemistry-related submodels and the online coupling with respect to the chemistry are correctly implemented. In comparison with observations, both EMAC and COSMO/MESSy show strengths and weaknesses. Especially in comparison to aircraft in situ observations, COSMO/MESSy shows very promising results. However, the amplitude of the diurnal cycle of ground-level ozone measurements is underestimated. Most of the differences between COSMO/MESSy and EMAC can be attributed to differences in the dynamics of both models, which are subject to further model developments.

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“…The application of online coupled regional meteorologychemistry models in Europe, among them WRF-Chem, has been recently reviewed by Baklanov et al (2014). The use of WRF-Chem over Europe has increased in recent years (e.g., Forkel et al, 2012;Žabkar et al, 2015;Solazzo et al, 2012a, b;Tuccella et al, 2012;Zhang et al, 2013a, b). However, only a limited number of these studies are dedicated to the evaluation of WRF-Chem-simulated meteorology and chemistry over the whole European domain.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In AQMEII phase 2, seven different WRF-Chem runs were part of the ensemble. Of these seven simulations, four of them used the gas-phase chemical mechanism RADM2 (Stockwell et al, 1990), two used the mechanism CBMZ (Zaveri and Peters, 1999), and one used the mechanism RACM (Stockwell et al, 1997;Geiger et al, 2003). All WRF-Chem simulations for Europe in AQMEII phase 2 tended to underestimate ozone concentrations, with annual average normalized mean bias ranging from −1.6 to −15.8 %, depending on the ensemble member.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Ozone air quality simulations with WRF-Chem (v3.5.1) over Europe: model evaluation and chemical mechanism comparison

et al. 2016

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We present an evaluation of the online regional model WRF-Chem over Europe with a focus on ground-level ozone (O-3) and nitrogen oxides (NOx). The model performance is evaluated for two chemical mechanisms, MOZART-4 and RADM2, for year-long simulations. Model-predicted surface meteorological variables (e.g., temperature, wind speed and direction) compared well overall with surface-based observations, consistent with other WRF studies. WRF-Chem simulations employing MOZART-4 as well as RADM2 chemistry were found to reproduce the observed spatial variability in surface ozone over Europe. However, the absolute O-3 concentrations predicted by the two chemical mechanisms were found to be quite different, with MOZART-4 predicting O-3 concentrations up to 20 mu g m(-3) greater than RADM2 in summer. Compared to observations, MOZART-4 chemistry overpredicted O-3 concentrations for most of Europe in the summer and fall, with a summertime domain-wide mean bias of +10 mu g m(-3) against observations from the AirBase network. In contrast, RADM2 chemistry generally led to an underestimation of O-3 over the European domain in all seasons. We found that the use of the MOZART-4 mechanism, evaluated here for the first time for a European domain, led to lower absolute biases than RADM2 when compared to ground-based observations. The two mechanisms show relatively similar behavior for NOx, with both MOZART-4 and RADM2 resulting in a slight underestimation of NOx compared to surface observations. Further investigation of the differences between the two mechanisms revealed that the net midday photochemical production rate of O-3 in summer is higher for MOZART-4 than for RADM2 for most of the domain. The largest differences in O-3 production can be seen over Germany, where net O-3 production in MOZART-4 is seen to be higher than in RADM2 by 1.8 ppbh 1 (3.6 mu g m(-3) h(-1)) or more. We also show that while the two mechanisms exhibit similar NOx sensitivity, RADM2 is approximately twice as sensitive to increases in anthropogenic VOC emissions as MOZART-4. Additionally, we found that differences in reaction rate coefficients for inorganic gas-phase chemistry in MOZART-4 vs. RADM2 accounted for a difference of 8 mu g m(-3), or 40% of the summertime difference in O-3 predicted by the two mechanisms. Differences in deposition and photolysis schemes explained smaller differences in O-3. Our results highlight the strong dependence of modeled surface O-3 over Europe on the choice of gas-phase chemical mechanism, which we discuss in the context of overall uncertainties in prediction of ground-level O-3 and its associated health impacts (via the health-related metrics MDA8 and SOMO35)

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Evaluation of the high resolution WRF-Chem (v3.4.1) air quality forecast and its comparison with statistical ozone predictions

Cited by 29 publications

References 72 publications

Evaluation of air quality forecasting system FORAIR_IT over Europe and Italy at high resolution for year 2017

Evaluation of air quality forecasting system FORAIR_IT over Europe and Italy at high resolution for year 2017

The 1-way on-line coupled model system MECO(n) – Part 4: Chemical evaluation (based on MESSy v2.52)

Ozone air quality simulations with WRF-Chem (v3.5.1) over Europe: model evaluation and chemical mechanism comparison

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