92nd American Meteorological Society Annual Meeting (January 22-26, 2012)

Wednesday, 25 January 2012: 5:30 PM
Policy Relevant Pollutant Background Simulations for the US Using a Multi-Scale Regional Climate Modeling System
Room 353 (New Orleans Convention Center )
Brian K. Lamb, Washington State Univ., Pullman, WA; and R. Gonzales Abraham, S. Chung, J. Avise, E. Salathé, Y. Zhang, A. Guenther, C. Wiedinmyer, T. Duhl, T. Strand, N. Stavros, S. Larkin, and D. McKenzie

Global change will clearly have a significant impact on the environment. Among the concerns for future air quality in the United States, intercontinental transport of pollution has become increasingly important. In this study, we examined the effect of the changes in chemical boundary conditions to produce pollutant background concentrations within the continental US as the basis for developing an understanding of policy relevant background levels. Meteorological fields were downscaled from the results of the ECHAM5 global climate model using the Weather Research Forecast (WRF) model. Two nested domains were employed, one covering most of the Northern Hemisphere from eastern Asia to North America at 220-km horizontal resolution (hemispheric domain) and one covering the continental US at 36-km resolution (CONUS). Meteorological results from WRF were used to drive the MEGAN biogenic emissions model, the SMOKE emissions processing tool, and the CMAQ chemical transport model to predict ozone and aerosol concentrations for the current (1995-2004) and a future decade (2045-2054). The MEGAN model was used to calculate biogenic emissions for all simulations. For the current decade hemispheric domain simulation, year 2000 global emissions of gases (ozone precursors) from anthropogenic, natural, and biomass burning sources from the POET and EDGAR emission inventories were used. Global emissions inventories for black and organic carbon from Bond et al (2004) were applied. For the future decade hemispheric domain simulations, current decade emissions were projected to the year 2050 following the Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change (IPCC) A1B emission scenario. WRF and CMAQ results from the hemispheric domain simulations provided the boundary conditions for CONUS simulations. For the CONUS simulations, all North American anthropogenic emissions were omitted so that only global background and local biogenic emissions were treated. We present the results showing the changes in ozone and PM background concentrations during summertime conditions due to changes in future climate and global emissions.

Supplementary URL: