2011 - Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences ...

1. The spatial Figure distribution 2: The spatial of the distribution US EPA of National the U.S. EPA Emission National Emission Inventory 2005 NOx emissions (top)
Inventory 2005 NOx emissions (top) and NO2 columns from the NASA OMI
O2 columns from satellite the NASA (bottom) OMI over satellite the Texas domain (bottom) used over in this the study. Texas domain used in this study.
and the private sector. CIERA 1 envisions an international
community to catalyze emissions research by facilitating
1) the consistent, timely and transparent development
of emissions inventories at all scales; 2) evaluations and
analyses of emissions data sets; and 3) the exchange and
communication of emissions information. In FY2011, the
vision for CIERA was formulated, CIERA sponsored emissions
research sessions at two major scientific conferences
and the CIERA web portal began development.
Product: Task 1: A manuscript describing the Texas emission
study will be submitted to the journal Atmospheric
Chemistry and Physics Discussions in July 2011.
Task 2: The CIERA web portal, http://ciera-air.org/, the
virtual work space for CIERA activities, began develop-
94 CIRES Annual Report 2011
ment in FY11 and will continue to be built and expanded in
the future.
Milestone 3. Use measurements of aerosols and their precursors
made during the 2006 Texas Air Quality Study field mission
in conjunction with a state-of-the-art air quality forecast
model to assess recent developments in the treatment of
secondary organic aerosol formation and their impact on
particulate matter (PM2.5) aerosol forecasts. Impact: This
CIRES research contributes to improved forecasts of aerosol
within air quality models and directly supports NOAA’s
mission of having an operational national PM2.5 aerosol
forecasting system by 2015.
Because particulate matter (PM2.5) aerosol are a public
health concern, NOAA and the National Weather Service
(NWS) have made it a mission to deploy an operational national
PM2.5 aerosol forecast system, much like the national
ozone forecast system currently in place within NOAA/
NWS. Several forecast and research centers are developing
PM2.5 forecast capabilities, such as the WRF/Chem
(Weather Research and Forecast coupled with Chemistry)
model within NOAA/ESRL. These models have undergone
evaluation using observations from intensive field studies
and surface PM2.5 network data, and have consistently
demonstrated that forecasts of PM2.5 suffer from inaccuracies
and biases that limit their usefulness. The most persistent
forecast deficiency is the under-prediction of secondary
organic aerosol (SOA).
This work incorporates recent laboratory and theoretical
advances in SOA formation to an accepted and welldocumented
PM2.5 forecast model. A new SOA formation
mechanism based on the Carnegie-Mellon Volatility Basis
Set Approach is applied to the WRF/Chem model, and
evaluated for summer 2006 using PM2.5 composition measurements
from three national networks and observations
from the Texas Air Quality Study. The results of this work
were submitted as a report to NWS in March 2011, and the
finished manuscript will be submitted in early August.
Critical evaluations show the new SOA module compares
well with available organic aerosol measurements and also
improves PM2.5 forecasts. The model code will be submitted
to the publicly accessible WRF model repository, and
plans are in place to transfer the code to NWS for developmental
testing at the national forecast center.
Figure 3: Average organic aerosol concentration between Aug. 1 and
Sept. 30, 2006, using Volatility Basis Set Approach within the NOAA/ESRL
WRF/Chem model.