A comparative performance evaluation of the AURAMS and CMAQ air-quality modelling systems

Abstract

A harmonized comparative performance evaluation of A Unified Regional Air-quality Modelling System (AURAMS) v1.3.1b and Community Multiscale Air Quality (CMAQ) v4.6 air-quality modelling systems was conducted on the same North American grid for July 2002 using the same emission inventories, emissions processor, and input meteorology. Comparison of AURAMS- and CMAQ-predicted O 3 concentrations against hourly surface measurement data showed a lower normalized mean bias (NMB) of 20.7% for AURAMS versus 46.4% for CMAQ. However, AURAMS and CMAQ had more similar normalized mean errors (NMEs) of 46.9% and 54.2%, respectively. Both models did similarly well in predicting daily 1-h O 3 maximums; however, AURAMS performed better in calculating daily minimums. CMAQ's poorer performance for O 3 is partly due to its inability to correctly predict nighttime lows. Total PM 2.5 hourly surface concentration was under-predicted by both AURAMS and CMAQ with NMBs of −10.4% and −65.2%, respectively. However, as with O 3, both models had similar NMEs of 68.0% and 70.6%, respectively. In general, AURAMS performance was better than CMAQ for all major PM 2.5 species except nitrate and elemental carbon. Both models significantly under-predicted total organic aerosols (TOAs), although the mean AURAMS concentration was over four times larger than CMAQ's. The under-prediction of TOA was partly due to the exclusion of forest-fire emissions. Sea-salt aerosol made up approximately 50.2% of the AURAMS total PM 2.5 surface concentration versus only 6.2% in CMAQ when averaged over all grid cells. When averaged over land cells only, sea-salt still contributed 13.9% to the total PM 2.5 mass in AURAMS versus 2.0% in CMAQ.