Monday, 10 January 2005
Simulating the effects of urban-scale land use change on surface meteorology and ozone concentrations in the New York City metropolitan region
We present results of a modeling study on the effects of land use change on surface level meteorological fields and ozone concentrations across the New York City metropolitan region. The model system consists of the Penn State/NCAR MM5 mesoscale meteorological model; the Sparse Matrix Operator Kernal Emissions (SMOKE) processing system; and the USEPA Community Multiscale Air Quality (CMAQ) model. The simulations were performed for a multi-day period during the summer of 1995. The land use change scenario investigated in this study was generated by the Urban Growth Model (UGM) and the Land Cover Deltatron Model (LCDM) which are part of the SLEUTH model. Specifically, SLEUTH was used to generate 70m resolution land use information over the New York City metropolitan area for both present-day (ca 1990) and future year (ca 2050) conditions, and this information was scaled up to the 4 km MM5/CMAQ grid. The 2050 land use scenario investigated here was developed following the narrative of the “A2” scenario generated by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) for that decade. In this future land use scenario, SLEUTH predicts that most of the region will be urbanized, and the impacts of these changes on meteorology and ozone concentrations are analyzed. Results indicate increases in near-surface temperature as a result of the urbanization, while the magnitude and direction of ozone changes display a more complex pattern. To further investigate the changes in both daily and episode maximum ozone concentrations, a detailed analysis of wind fields, clouds, and mixed layer heights is presented for the MM5 simulations under both present and future year land use scenarios.
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