Simulation of Sulfate Aerosol in Ease ASIA using Models-3/CMAQ with RAMS Meteorological Data

Abstract

Interest has grown to understand the transport and chemistry of pollutants originating from eastern Asia, which is undergoing rapid industrialization. Acid deposition has become one of key environmental issues due to the increased use of high-sulfur fossil fuels in the area. During the last decade, comprehensive air quality models have been used to assess the severity of acid deposition problems and to develop effective emissions control strategies for North America and Europe. Recently, U.S. EPA has developed and publicly released the Models-3 Community Multiscale Air Quality (CMAQ) modeling system (Byun and Ching, 1999). It is a comprehensive modeling system that consists of a meteorological model, an emissions processing and projection system, and several interface processors such as Meteorology-Chemistry Interface Processor (MCIP), as well as the CMAQ Chemical Transport Model (CCTM). One of key design objectives of Models-3 CMAQ was to achieve flexibility that enables linkage of different science processors and modules to build appropriate air quality models to meet user’s needs. It adapts a generalized coordinate system with governing equations for the fully compressible atmosphere to allow linkage of different description of atmospheric dynamics for multiscale applications. It uses efficient modular structure with minimal data dependency and a set of a generalized chemistry solver module and chemical mechanism reader to handle multi-pollutant problems. The Models-3 CMAQ modeling system utilizes the Mesoscale Model Generation 5 (MM5) as the default meteorological driver. Until now, it has been tested only with a few applications in USA. The present study attempts to address a few challenges in utilizing the flexibility of the system. We apply the CMAQ system with the meteorological data provided by the Regional Atmospheric Modeling System (RAMS) and to a different geographical area East Asia covering the eastern half of China, Korean peninsula, and the Islands of Japan.