HR: 16:30h
AN: A34A-03    [Abstracts]
TI: Eastern Texas Air Quality Forecasting System to Support TexAQS-II and 8-hour Ozone Modeling
AU: * Byun, D W
EM: dbyun@mail.uh.edu
AF: IMAQS, & Dept. of Geosciences, University of Houston, 312 Science & Research Bldg. 1, Houston, TX 77204-5007 United States
AB: The main objective of the Second Texas Air Quality Study (TexAQS-II) for 2005 and 2006 is to understand emissions and processes associated with the formation and transport of ozone and regional haze in Texas. The target research area is the more populated eastern half of the state, roughly from Interstate 35 eastward. Accurate meteorological and photochemical modeling efforts are essential to support this study and further enhance modeling efforts for establishing the State Implementation Plan (SIP) by Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ). An air quality forecasting (AQF) system for Eastern Texas has been developed to provide these data and to further facilitate retrospective simulations to allow for model improvement and increased understanding of ozone episodes and emissions. We perform two-day air quality forecasting simulations with the 12-km Eastern Texas regional domain, and the 4-km Houston-Galveston area (HGA) domain utilizing a 48-CPU Beowulf Linux computer system. The dynamic boundary conditions are provided by the 36-km resolution conterminous US (CONUS) domain CMAQ simulations. Initial meteorological conditions are provided by the daily ETA forecast results. The results of individual runs are stored and made available to researchers and state and local officials via internet to study the patterns of air quality and its relationship to weather conditions and emissions. The data during the pre- and post-processing stages are in tens of gigabytes and must be managed efficiently during both the actual real-time and the subsequent computation periods. The nature of these forecasts and the time at which the initial data is available necessitates that models be executed within tight deadlines. A set of complex operational scripts is used to allow automatic operation of the data download, sequencing processors, performing graphical analysis, building database archives, and presenting on the web.
DE: 0345 Pollution: urban and regional (0305, 0478, 4251)
DE: 0368 Troposphere: constituent transport and chemistry
SC: Atmospheric Sciences [A]
MN: Fall Meeting 2005