Regional-scale Atmospheric Models Research Articles

Effects of Lateral Flow on the Convective Environment in a Coupled Hydrometeorological Modeling System in a Semiarid Environment

AbstractEvidence for surface and atmosphere coupling is corroborated in both modeling and observation-based field experiments. Recent advances in high-performance computing and development of convection-permitting regional-scale atmospheric models combined with high-resolution hydrologic models have made modeling of surface–atmosphere interactions feasible for the scientific community. These hydrological models can account for the impacts of the overland flow and subsurface flow components of the hydrologic cycle and account for the impact of lateral flow on moisture redistribution at the land surface. One such model is the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) regional atmospheric model that can be coupled to the WRF-Hydro hydrologic model. In the present study, both the uncoupled WRF (WRF-ARW) and otherwise identical WRF-Hydro model are executed for the 2017 and 2018 summertime North American monsoon (NAM) seasons in semiarid central Arizona. In this environment, diurnal convection is impacted by precipitation recycling from the land surface. The goal of this work is to evaluate the impacts that surface runoff and shallow subsurface flow, as depicted in WRF-Hydro, have on surface–atmosphere interactions and convection in a coupled atmospheric simulation. The current work assesses the impact of surface hydrologic processes on 1) local surface energy budgets during the NAM throughout Arizona and 2) the spectral behavior of diurnally driven NAM convection. Model results suggest that adding surface and subsurface flow from WRF-Hydro increases soil moisture and latent heat near the surface. This increases the amount of instability and moisture available for deep convection in the model simulations and enhances the organization of convection at the peak of the diurnal cycle.

Modeling intercontinental transport of ozone in North America with CAMx for the Air Quality Model Evaluation International Initiative (AQMEII) Phase 3

Abstract. Intercontinental ozone (O3) transport extends the geographic range of O3 air pollution impacts and makes local air pollution management more difficult. Phase 3 of the Air Quality Modeling Evaluation International Initiative (AQMEII-3) is examining the contribution of intercontinental transport to regional air quality by applying regional-scale atmospheric models jointly with global models. We investigate methods for tracing O3 from global models within regional models. The CAMx photochemical grid model was used to track contributions from boundary condition (BC) O3 over a North American modeling domain for calendar year 2010 using a built-in tracer module called RTCMC. RTCMC can track BC contributions using chemically reactive tracers and also using inert tracers in which deposition is the only sink for O3. Lack of O3 destruction chemistry in the inert tracer approach leads to overestimation biases that can exceed 10 ppb. The flexibility of RTCMC also allows tracking O3 contributions made by groups of vertical BC layers. The largest BC contributions to seasonal average daily maximum 8 h averages (MDA8) of O3 over the US are found to be from the mid-troposphere (over 40 ppb) with small contributions (a few ppb) from the upper troposphere–lower stratosphere. Contributions from the lower troposphere are shown to not penetrate very far inland. Higher contributions in the western than the eastern US, reaching an average of 57 ppb in Denver for the 30 days with highest MDA8 O3 in 2010, present a significant challenge to air quality management approaches based solely on local or US-wide emission reductions. The substantial BC contribution to MDA8 O3 in the Intermountain West means regional models are particularly sensitive to any biases and errors in the BCs. A sensitivity simulation with reduced BC O3 in response to 20 % lower emissions in Asia found a near-linear relationship between the BC O3 changes and surface O3 changes in the western US in all seasons and across the US in fall and winter. However, the surface O3 decreases are small: below 1 ppb in spring and below 0.5 ppb in other seasons.

Comparing apples with apples: Using spatially distributed time series of monitoring data for model evaluation

A more sensible use of monitoring data for the evaluation and development of regional-scale atmospheric models is proposed. The motivation stems from observing current practices in this realm where the quality of monitoring data is seldom questioned and model-to-data deviation is uniquely attributed to model deficiency. Efforts are spent to quantify the uncertainty intrinsic to the measurement process, but aspects connected to model evaluation and development have recently emerged that remain obscure, such as the spatial representativeness and the homogeneity of signals subjects of our investigation. By using time series of hourly records of ozone for a whole year (2006) collected by the European AirBase network the area of representativeness is firstly analysed showing, for similar class of stations (urban, suburban, rural), large heterogeneity and high sensitivity to the density of the network and to the noise of the signal, suggesting the mere station classification to be not a suitable candidate to help select the pool of stations used in model evaluation. Therefore a novel, more robust technique is developed based on the spatial properties of the associativity of the spectral components of the ozone time series, in an attempt to determine the level of homogeneity. The spatial structure of the associativity among stations is informative of the spatial representativeness of that specific component and automatically tells about spatial anisotropy. Time series of ozone data from North American networks have also been analysed to support the methodology. We find that the low energy components (especially the intra-day signal) suffer from a too strong influence of country-level network set-up in Europe, and different networks in North America, showing spatial heterogeneity exactly at the administrative border that separates countries in Europe and at areas separating different networks in North America. For model evaluation purposes these elements should be treated as purely stochastic and discarded, while retaining the portion of the signal useful to the evaluation process. Trans-boundary discontinuity of the intra-day signal along with cross-network grouping has been found to be predominant. Skills of fifteen regional chemical-transport modelling systems have been assessed in light of this result, finding an improved accuracy of up to 5% when the intra-day signal is removed with respect to the case where all components are analysed.

CMAQ Model Performance Enhanced When In-Cloud Secondary Organic Aerosol is Included: Comparisons of Organic Carbon Predictions with Measurements

Mounting evidence suggests that low-volatility (particle-phase) organic compounds form in the atmosphere through aqueous phase reactions in clouds and aerosols. Although some models have begun including secondary organic aerosol (SOA) formation through cloud processing, validation studies that compare predictions and measurements are needed. In this work, agreement between modeled organic carbon (OC) and aircraft measurements of water soluble OC improved for all 5 of the compared ICARTT NOAA-P3 flights during August when an in-cloud SOA (SOAcld) formation mechanism was added to CMAQ (a regional-scale atmospheric model). The improvement was most dramatic for the August 14th flight, a flight designed specifically to investigate clouds. During this flight the normalized mean bias for layer-averaged OC was reduced from -64 to -15% and correlation (r) improved from 0.5 to 0.6. Underpredictions of OC aloft by atmospheric models may be explained, in part, by this formation mechanism (SOAcld). OC formation aloft contributes to long-range pollution transport and has implications to radiative forcing, regional air quality and climate.

Numerical modeling of minor gas constituents and aerosols in the atmosphere

In this paper, the structure of meso- and regional-scale atmospheric models is briefly described. The models incorporate transport of multicomponent pollutant transport/transformation and aerosol formation through nucleation, condensation–evaporation, and coagulation mechanisms. Also, an optimization problem is considered aimed at minimizing the emission source magnitudes. The results of numerical experiments are presented for a number of applications to demonstrate the model capabilities in solving environmental problems for different areas. Analysis of the numerical results shows that the models developed can be successfully used for solving regional environmental problems.