[1] Large changes in surface‐level PM2.5 concentrations and columnar aerosol optical thickness (AOT) were observed downwind of fires that originated in Georgia and Florida during the April–May 2007 period. In order to quantify the impacts of these wildfires on particulate matter air quality, Community Multiscale Air Quality (CMAQ) simulations were conducted by adding hourly fire emissions deriv...

[1] Evaluation of concentrations predicted by air quality models is needed to ensure that model results are compatible with observations. In this study aerosol properties derived from the Community Multiscale Air Quality (CMAQ) model-simulated aerosol mass concentrations are compared with routine data from NASA satellite-borne Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) sensor aboard ...

Proposed emission control strategies for reducing ozone and particulate matter are evaluated better when air quality and health effects models are used together. The Community Multiscale Air Quality (CMAQ) model is the US Environmental Protection Agency's model for determining public policy and forecasting air quality. CMAQ was used to forecast air quality changes due to several emission contro...

The US Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) Community Multiscale Air Quality (CMAQ) modeling system version 4.7 is further developed to enhance its capability in simulating the photochemical cycles in the presence of dust particles. The new model treatments implemented in CMAQ v4.7 in this work include two online dust emission schemes (i.e., the Zender and Westphal schemes), nine dust-relate...

Atmospheric processes and the associated transport and dispersion of atmospheric pollutants are known to be highly variable in time and space. Current air-quality models that characterize atmospheric chemistry effects, for example, the Community Multiscale Air Quality model (CMAQ), provide volume-averaged concentration values for each grid cell in the modeling domain given the stated conditions...

Multiple metrics to characterize air pollution are available for use in environmental health analyses in addition to the standard Air Quality System (AQS) pollution monitoring data. These metrics have complete spatial-temporal coverage across a domain and are therefore crucial in calculating pollution exposures in geographic areas where AQS monitors are not present. We investigate the impact th...

In order to optimize surface CO2 fluxes at grid scales, a regional surface CO2 flux inversion system (Carbon Flux Inversion system and Community Multi-scale Air Quality, CFI-CMAQ) has been developed by applying the ensemble Kalman filter (EnKF) to constrain the CO2 concentrations and applying the ensemble Kalman smoother (EnKS) to optimize the surface CO2 fluxes. The smoothing operator is assoc...

New statistical procedures to evaluate the Models-3/Community Multiscale Air Quality (CMAQ) using observed data are introduced. Certain space-time correlations are used to assess dynamic aspects of CMAQ and to compare the space-time structure of CMAQ to that of observations. Our analyses show that, overall, CMAQ matches the space-time correlation structure of observed sulfate concentrations wel...

Abstract. The latest operational National Air Quality Forecast Capability (NAQFC) has been advanced to use the Community Multiscale (CMAQ) model (version 5.3.1) with CB6r3 (Carbon Bond 6 revision 3) AERO7 7 of aerosol module) chemical mechanism and is driven by Finite-Volume Cubed-Sphere (FV3) Global System, version 16 (GFSv16). This update accomplished via development meteorological preprocess...

Plume rise is the height smoke plumes can reach. This information is needed by air quality models such as the Community Multiscale Air Quality (CMAQ) model to simulate physical and chemical processes of point-source fire emissions. This study seeks to understand the importance of plume rise to CMAQ air quality simulation of prescribed burning to plume rise. CMAQ simulations are compared between...