Ozone Modeling Over a Large City by Using a Mesoscale Eulerian Meteorological and Transport Model: Madrid Case Study

Abstract

Air Quality models are essential tools in the understanding of pollutant dynamics in the atmosphere. In recent years, our understanding of the scientific foundations of the chemical and physical phenomena occurring in the atmosphere has continued to expand. We are able to construct comprehensive models that describe the dynamics of the air pollution. The inherent complexity and nonlinearity of the governing equations has made air quality modelling a computational “Grand Challenge”. Because grid models cannot explicitly simulate processes which occur on spatial scales smaller than the grid cells, the importance of such processes must be assessed. If a particular subgrid processes is found to be significant to the objective of the simulation, either the grid resolution of the model should be increased or a subgrid parameterization should be developed to account for the effect of the subgrid process. This is an important and common factor to all mesoscale and regional atmospheric chemistry models, such as the Acid Deposition and Oxidant Model (ADOM1) and Regional Acid Deposition Model (RADM2) and the Sulfur Transport Eulerian Model (STEM3). Because of this limiting factor and essentially for the final objectives of these simulations, comparison with monitoring data can only be made taking into account that the data has very different nature and limiting processes in the simulation and measuring sides are present. With this in mind, we present in this contribution the results of a photochemical numerical mesoscale Eulerian simulation over the Madrid (Spain) urban and suburban area by using the data from a meteorological sounding at 0h00 and 12h00 in the Madrid International Airport (Barajas) as input meteorological information and Madrid Municipality Pollution Monitoring Network at two stations into the Urban Area. Because of enormous computing requirements we have restricted the investigation to one day (August, 15th, 1991) and also because of the data availability. Further investigations on speeding-up the code and parallelization should be performed.