Performance evaluation of AURAMS for 2004 ICARTT/NEAQS-2K4 campaign period

AURAMS (A Unified Regional Air-quality Modeling System) is an episodic, multi-pollutant, regional air-quality (AQ) modelling system that predicts size-resolved and chemically-characterized particulate matter (PM). AURAMS was run in real time during the summer 2004 ICARTT/NEAQS-2K4 field campaign to support flight operations of an MSC instrumented aircraft in the Lake Erie region. During and immediately after the campaign, AURAMS predictions were compared against ozone and PM measurements from a number of surface networks and against predictions from other real-time AQ models. Since the campaign, several retrospective runs have been made for the same period with a more recent version of AURAMS to investigate the impact on model performance of an updated treatment of biogenic emissions and revised estimates of U.S. NOx emissions from major point sources. This presentation will summarize the performance evaluation results obtained for the different model versions. The focus will be on the comparison with surface ozone and PM measurements, but results will also be shown for comparisons with other AQ models and with other types of measurements made during the summer 2004 field campaign.