A Review of WRF-STEM and WRF-Chem Regional Modeling Studies over the Northeastern US and Future Perspectives

Here we review our WRF-STEM and WRF-Chem regional modeling studies on northeastern US air quality conducted over the past decades. These include inverse modeling of emission fluxes, quantifying impacts of long-range transport of pollution, and improving model representations of land-atmosphere exchange processes. Through these studies we demonstrate that the use of multidimensional and multidisciplinary observations in these studies led to improved model performance and understanding of scientific questions and the approaches applied are extendable to other regions of the world. The importance of continued model development and increase in computing power on advancing such research and applications is highlighted. A list of areas for improvement in these modeling tools for better studying air quality in these areas as well as potential paths of STEM code update and "modernization" are discussed.