Development of the MPAS-CMAQ coupled system (V1.0) for multiscale global air quality modeling

Abstract

The Community Multiscale Air Quality (CMAQ) model has been used for regulatory purposes at the U.S. EPA and in the research community for decades. In 2012, we released the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF)-CMAQ coupled model that enables aerosol information from CMAQ to affect meteorological processes through direct effects on shortwave radiation. Both CMAQ and WRF-CMAQ are considered limited-area models. Recently, we have extended domain coverage to the global scale by linking the meteorological Model for Prediction Across Scales – Atmosphere (MPAS-A, hereafter referred simply to as MPAS) with CMAQ to form the MPAS-CMAQ global coupled model. To configure these three different models, i.e., CMAQ (offline), WRF-CMAQ, and MPAS-CMAQ, we have developed the Advanced Air Quality Modeling System (AAQMS) for constructing each of them effortlessly. We evaluate this newly built MPAS-CMAQ coupled model using two global configurations: a 120 km uniform mesh and a 92–25 km variable mesh with the finer area over North America. Preliminary computational tests show good scalability and model evaluation, when using a 3-year simulation (2014–2016) for the uniform mesh case and a monthly simulation of January and July 2016 for the variable mesh case, on ozone and PM2.5 and show reasonable performance with respect to observations. The 92–25 km configuration has a high bias in wintertime surface ozone across the United States, and this bias is consistent with the 120 km result. Summertime surface ozone in the 92–25 km configuration is less biased than the 120 km case. The MPAS-CMAQ system reasonably reproduces the daily variability of daily average PM from the Air Quality System (AQS) network.