I am running a nested simulation for near-surface ozone concentrations. My simulation contains two nested domains (D01 and D02). I noticed that the boundary conditions for D02 will come from the CCTM_CONC file for D01.
My question is: How should I set CONC_SPCS (CONC file species) and CONC_BLEV_ELEV (CONC file layer range) in the CCTM script to make the D01’s CCTM_CONC file provide more reasonable boundary conditions for D02? I know that setting both CONC_SPCS and CONC_BLEV_ELEV to “ALL” is a safe solution. But then CCTM_CONC file would take up a lot of disk space. Is there any recommended CONC_SPCS and CONC_BLEV_ELEV settings for simulating near-surface ozone? If anyone can make some suggestions, I would be very very grateful.
If D01 and D02 share the same vertical structure, CONC_BLEV_ELEV should be set to the full layer range when running D01.
Setting CONC_SPCS to “ALL” when running D01 will indeed give you the most complete representation of the chemical state of the atmosphere at the boundary of D02. To save some disk space, you could likely eliminate short-lived species like radicals without seeing much impact on results. Eliminating aerosol species would certainly reduce file size but would impact results through photolysis and gas/particle partitioning.
One approach to manage disk space would be to run BCON shortly after each day’s D01 simulation is finished and then delete the D01 CCTM_CONC file after verifying that the desired D02 boundary conditions were generated successfully (and after possibly extracting some selected D01 3D information for further analysis, if desired). While this would not eliminate the additional time needed for the D01 simuation to write out the full 3D file, it would greatly reduce disk space usage.