(748a) Downscaling Camx Using a Reduced Complexity Model: A Multiscale Modeling Approach for Urban Air Pollution
AIChE Annual Meeting
2021
2021 Annual Meeting
Environmental Division
Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics: Laboratory Studies - Virtual
Thursday, November 18, 2021 - 12:30pm to 12:50pm
Therefore, in this work we propose a multiscale modeling system to overcome this limitation of regional chemical transport models. We use the Comprehensive Air Quality Model with Extensions (CAMx), a common regional scale model used in the United States, to predict concentrations at a regional scale (12 x 12 km resolution) for the Contiguous United States. We further resolved these estimates using a reduced complexity model, InMAP, that uses grid adaptations to produce a variable horizontal resolution grid. The reduced complexity model provides higher spatial resolution, down to 500-meters, in densely populated areas and lower resolution in more sparsely populated areas. This provides additional spatial resolution in the urban areas that experience more spatial heterogeneity in air pollutant concentrations. We use source-specific spatial surrogates to calculate the emissions in each grid cell. We compare the simulated concentrations to monitoring data provided by the EPA. The proposed approach is the first step toward understanding the spatial and temporal variability of air pollution in urban areas.