Abstract
Abstract. The Community Multiscale Air Quality (CMAQ) modeling system, a state-of-the-science regional air quality modeling system developed by the US Environmental Protection Agency, is being used for a variety of environmental modeling problems including regulatory applications, air quality forecasting, evaluation of emissions control strategies, process-level research, and interactions of global climate change and regional air quality. The Meteorology-Chemistry Interface Processor (MCIP) is a vital piece of software within the CMAQ modeling system that serves to, as best as possible, maintain dynamic consistency between the meteorological model and the chemical transport model (CTM). MCIP acts as both a post-processor to the meteorological model and a pre-processor to the emissions and the CTM in the CMAQ modeling system. MCIP's functions are to ingest the meteorological model output fields in their native formats, perform horizontal and vertical coordinate transformations, diagnose additional atmospheric fields, define gridding parameters, and prepare the meteorological fields in a form required by the CMAQ modeling system. This paper provides an updated overview of MCIP, documenting the scientific changes that have been made since it was first released as part of the CMAQ modeling system in 1998.
Highlights
The Community Multiscale Air Quality (CMAQ) modeling system (Byun and Schere, 2006) simulates atmospheric processes and air quality over a broad range of spatial and temporal scales using a comprehensive computational framework based on first-principles solutions
Each meteorological model generates its own suite of geospatial and prognostic fields that need to be converted into a standardized suite of fields and a common file format that is expected by the CMAQ modeling system
In cases where other planetary boundary layer (PBL) models are used in Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF), MeteorologyChemistry Interface Processor (MCIP) includes algorithms to compute PBL heights and nearsurface fields that are required for the chemical transport model (CTM)
Summary
The Community Multiscale Air Quality (CMAQ) modeling system (Byun and Schere, 2006) simulates atmospheric processes and air quality (including gas-phase chemistry, heterogeneous chemistry, particulate matter, and airborne toxic pollutants) over a broad range of spatial and temporal scales. The Meteorology-Chemistry Interface Processor (MCIP) is a critical component of the CMAQ modeling system that post-processes the meteorological model output fields and pre-processes them for the emissions and the CTM. The output from MCIP is a suite of model-ready meteorological fields that are input for emissions processing and for the CTM. MCIP is designed to maximize physical, spatial, and, temporal consistency between the meteorological fields and the CTM In this manner, MCIP is sensitive to the horizontal staggering and vertical coordinate systems of the input meteorological models, and it is tailored to internally adapt to those details. MCIP is designed to maximize the use of the prognostic fields directly from the meteorological model wherever possible. The CMAQ modeling system (including its emissions processing component) uses output from MCIP without specifying the source model for the incoming meteorological data.
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