88th Annual Meeting (20-24 January 2008)

Thursday, 24 January 2008: 2:15 PM
Sensitivity of CMAQ to urbanized meteorological fields based on National Urban Database and Access Portal Tools (NUDAPT)
220 (Ernest N. Morial Convention Center)
Jason K. Ching, USEPA/ORD/NERL/AMD, Research Triangle Park, NC NC; and H. Taha, F. Chen, and S. Miao
Applications of photochemical models (e.g., CMAQ and others) to urban areas at grid sizes of order 1 km are made feasible with new and advanced meteorological models and the newly available high resolution urban building and land use data. Modeling systems including MM5 and WRF can now introduce model treatments of the effects of buildings, vegetation and land use data in urban areas with urban canopy parameters (UCPs). We describe and show results based on performing sensitivity testing of CMAQ using inputs from both MM5 and WRF systems for simulations of air quality of Houston during the Texas 2000 field experiments. The input urban parameters for the MM5 and WRF are from the National Urban Database and Access Portal Tool (NUDAPT). The initial prototype of NUDAPT was sponsored by the USEPA and involved collaborations and contributions from many groups including federal and state agencies and from private and academic institutions. NUDAPT can produce and provide gridded fields of urban canopy parameterizations for various new and advanced descriptions of model physics to improve urban simulations given the availability of new high-resolution data of urban buildings and land usage. Ancillary information such as gridded population, anthropogenic heat fluxes, traffic data is incorporated as available so as to encourage and facilitate linkages to human exposure models. An important core-design feature is the utilization of web portal technology to enable NUDAPT to be a “Community” based system. This web-based portal technology facilitates data retrievals and handling based on data federation concepts. With NUDAPT, we explore CMAQ sensitivities including, but not limited to (a) urban canopy parameters, (b) anthropogenic heat fluxes, (c) different land use classes, and to modifications of UCPs and land cover for urban planning scenarios.

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