P46  Impacts of Different Land Cover Data on Meteorology and Air Quality Modeling, Part 1: Meteorology Simulations

Ran, Limei, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, Robert Gilliam, Jonathan Pleim, William Benjey, EPA NERL/ORD

Land cover data is used in not only land surface models (LSMs) for meteorology modeling to estimate the exchanges of heat, moisture, and momentum between the land surface and the atmosphere but also in dry deposition and biogenic emission modeling and emission spatial allocations for air quality simulations.  Thus, consistent and accurate land cover data plays an important role in meteorology and air quality modeling systems.  A meteorology and atmospheric chemistry modeling system based on the WRF model and the Community Multiscale Air Quality (CMAQ) model is the focus of this research. The objective of this study is to assess the impacts of different land cover data sets on the WRF/CMAQ modeling using the PX LSM during the August 2006 TexAQS period.  For this workshop, the presentation will address the degree of sensitivity of the WRF system to four different land cover data sets with different classification and resolution (2006 NLCD/MODIS, 2006 MODIS, WPS 24 category USGS, and 1992 NLCD land cover data sets) for three nested domains (12km, 4km, 1km). Simulated temperature, moisture, wind speed and direction, surface radiation budgets, and PBL height will be compared among different simulations and analyzed with measurement data.