The Another Assimilation System for WRF-Chem (AAS4WRF): a new
mass-conserving emissions pre-processor for WRF-Chem regional modelling
Abstract
The Weather Research and Forecasting with Chemistry (WRF-Chem) community
model have been widely used for the study of pollutants transport,
formation of secondary pollutants, as well as for the assessment of air
quality policies implementation. A key factor to improve the WRF-Chem
air quality simulations over urban areas is the representation of
anthropogenic emission sources. There are several tools that are
available to assist users in creating their own emissions based on
global emissions information (e.g. anthro_emiss, prep_chem_src);
however, there is no single tool that will construct local emissions
input datasets for any particular domain at this time. Because the
official emissions pre-processor (emiss_v03) is designed to work with
domains located over North America, this work presents the Another
Assimilation System for WRF-Chem (AAS4WRF), a ncl based mass-conserving
emissions pre-processor designed to create WRF-Chem ready emissions
files from local inventories on a lat/lon projection. AAS4WRF is
appropriate to scale emission rates from both surface and elevated
sources, providing the users an alternative way to assimilate their
emissions to WRF-Chem. Since it was successfully tested for the first
time for the city of Lima, Peru in 2014 (managed by SENAMHI, the
National Weather Service of the country), several studies on air quality
modelling have applied this utility to convert their emissions to those
required for WRF-Chem. Two case studies performed in the metropolitan
areas of Sao Paulo and Manizales in Brazil and Colombia, respectively,
are here presented in order to analyse the influence of using local or
global emission inventories in the representation of regulated air
pollutants such as O3 and PM2.5. Although AAS4WRF works with local
emissions information at the moment, further work is being conducted to
make it compatible with global/regional emissions data file format. The
tool is freely available upon request to the corresponding author.