ALBERT

Description: High mixing ratios of ozone along the shores of Lake Michigan have been a recurring theme over the last 40 years. Models continue to have difficulty in replicating ozone behavior in the region. Although emissions and chemistry may play a role in model performance, the complex meteorological setting of the relatively cold lake in the summer ozone season and the ability of the physical model to replicate this environment may contribute to air quality modeling errors. In this paper, several aspects of the physical atmosphere that may affect air quality, along with potential paths to improve the physical simulations, are broadly examined. The first topic is the consistent overwater overprediction of ozone. Although overwater measurements are scarce, special boat and ferry ozone measurements over the last 15 years have indicated consistent overprediction by models. The roles of model mixing and lake surface temperatures are examined in terms of changing stability over the lake. From an analysis of a 2009 case, it is tentatively concluded that excessive mixing in the meteorological model may lead to an underestimate of mixing in offline chemical models when different boundary layer mixing schemes are used. This is because the stable boundary layer shear, which is removed by mixing in the meteorological model, can no longer produce mixing when mixing is rediagnosed in the offline chemistry model. Second, air temperature has an important role in directly affecting chemistry and emissions. Land–water temperature contrasts are critical to lake and land breezes, which have an impact on mixing and transport. Here, satellite-derived skin temperatures are employed as a path to improve model temperature performance. It is concluded that land surface schemes that adjust moisture based on surface energetics are important in reducing temperature errors.

Description: The overprediction of surface wind speed during nighttime by the Advanced Research core of the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF-ARW) model was investigated for a period of the Second Texas Air Quality Study (28 May–3 July 2006). In coastal regions of southeastern Texas, the model had a significant increase of wind speed biases on the surface in the evening throughout the period, especially between 4 and 12 June. The synoptic pattern was a high pressure system centered over the Louisiana–Mississippi area that was subjected to a weak easterly–southeasterly flow in the lower troposphere. The weather conditions favorable for sea-breeze development brought a southerly–southwesterly onshore flow to the near-surface levels. In comparison with measurements, the downward sensible heat flux was overpredicted at night, which resulted in a warm bias in surface temperature. For the vertical wind profile on days with an evening wind bias, sea-breeze-driven nocturnal low-level jets (southerly–southwesterly) were present at around 300 m while another wind maximum was observed at higher levels (around 1.5–2 km), which were associated with a high pressure system centered on southeastern states. The vertical gradient of wind speed in the lowest 150 m was smoother in the model than it was in the observations; this could be attributed to excessive downward mixing. Sensitivities using different land surface and PBL parameterizations showed that the model's overprediction of nocturnal wind was still present despite improvements in the predictions of surface temperature and sensible heat flux.

Description: High levels of ozone have been observed along the shores of Lake Michigan for the last 40 years. Models continue to struggle in their ability to replicate ozone behavior in the region. In the retrospective way in which models are used in air quality regulation development, nudging or four-dimensional data assimilation (FDDA) of the large-scale environment is important for constraining model forecast errors. Here, paths for incorporating large-scale meteorological conditions but retaining model mesoscale structure are evaluated. For the July 2011 case studied here, iterative FDDA strategies did not improve mesoscale performance in the Great Lakes region in terms of diurnal trends or monthly averaged statistics, with overestimations of nighttime wind speed remaining as an issue. Two vertical nudging strategies were evaluated for their effects on the development of nocturnal low-level jets (LLJ) and their impacts on air quality simulations. Nudging only above the planetary boundary layer, which has been a standard option in many air quality simulations, significantly dampened the amplitude of LLJ relative to nudging only above a height of 2 km. While the LLJ was preserved with nudging only above 2 km, there was some deterioration in wind performance when compared with profiler networks above the jet between 500 m and 2 km. In examining the impact of nudging strategies on air quality performance of the Community Multiscale Air Quality model, it was found that performance was improved for the case of nudging above 2 km. This result may reflect the importance of the LLJ in transport or perhaps a change in mixing in the models.