P68 Towards the Next Generation Air Quality Modeling System: Current Progress on Implementing Chemistry into MPAS-A

Foroutan, Hosein, David C. Wong, Jonathan E. Pleim, O. Russell Bullock Jr., Robert C. Gilliam, Jerold A. Herwehe, George A. Pouliot, and Christian Hogrefe,Computational Exposure Division, National Exposure Research Laboratory, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Research Triangle Park, NC, USA

The community multiscale air quality (CMAQ) model of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is one of the most widely used air quality model worldwide; it is employed for both research and regulatory applications at major universities and government agencies for improving understanding of the formation and transport of air pollutants. It is noted, however, that air quality issues and climate change assessments need to be addressed globally recognizing the linkages and interactions between meteorology and atmospheric chemistry across a wide range of scales. Therefore, an effort is currently underway to develop the next generation air quality modeling system (NGAQM) that will be based on a global integrated meteorology and chemistry system. The model for prediction across scales-atmosphere (MPAS-A), a global fully compressible non-hydrostatic model with seamlessly refined centroidal Voronoi grids, has been chosen as the meteorological driver of this modeling system. The initial step of adapting MPAS-A for the NGAQM was to implement and test the physics parameterizations and options that are preferred for retrospective air quality simulations (see the work presented by R. Gilliam, R. Bullock, and J. Herwehe at this workshop). The next step, presented herein, would be to link the chemistry from CMAQ to MPAS-A to build a prototype for the NGAQM. Furthermore, the techniques to harmonize transport processes between CMAQ and MPAS-A, methodologies to connect the chemistry module with MPAS-A, and computational issues such as parallelism and I/O structure are being addressed.