Assessing Air Quality Models In Coastal Marine Environments Under Different PBL Physics in the Gulf of Mexico

The coastal Boundary Layer responds to complex interactions between the land surface (soil, vegetation, and topography), atmosphere, and ocean state, which ultimately affects the energy fluxes, fluid motions, and indeed the transport of pollutants. It is important to explore the numerical representation of such coastal interactions to determine better input data in modeling applications of air quality. For this end, the evaluation of atmospheric models under different physics configurations and different boundary conditions are necessary. Such evaluation is usually ignored. This preliminary study is about evaluating meteorological fields under several physics configurations in the WRF model and using such results in regulatory models on the outer continental shelf. The study tests pollutant dispersions when using Aermod/Aercoare and Calpuff models in the Gulf of Mexico.