Which land use type should be considered as soil surface in BELD4

SMOKE
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Dear all,

I want to extract the NOX emissions from soil surface from the BEIS sector’s emissions in the EPA’s 2020 emissions modeling platform. I notice that there are 286 land use categories contained in BELD4. Do you know which land use type should be considered as soil surface in BELD4? Much appreciated for your help!

Best wishes,
Lingyun

2

BELD variables are types of vegetation. There is no soil surface in BELD4 or any BELD dataset.

However, I did find a mention of soil output in this documentation, if that is what your question is asking.
Table 5. EPIC-to-CMAQ soil output variables.

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As a starting point to determine which BELD4 types have the potential to emit NO, I think you could look at the BELD4 emission factor file used by normbeis (i.e. the file specified by environment variable BEISFAC). Scroll to the section where column two says “NO” and see which BELD4 land use / vegetation types listed in column 1 have non-zero normalized NO emission factors in column 4.

In addition, having a quick look at the normbeis.f and rdnormbeis4_efs.f code, it seems that land use / vegetation types are classified as either agricultural land or non-agricultural land in subroutine rdnormbeis4_efs.f, and that the log file when running normbeis should have a section reporting which BELD4 types are classified as agricultural (lines 426 - 429 of normbeis.f). For agricultural types, the normbeis code then seems to be calculating normalized NO emission factors for growing season and non-growing season time periods as variables AVG_NOAG_GROW and AVG_NOAG_NONGROW respectively, while for other types a single normalized NO emission factor is being generated and written to the normbeis output file as variable AVG_NONONAG.

I’ll caveat this answer by saying that I have not run normbeis and tmpbeis in a very long time, all of the above is based on just looking at the code and I very well may have missed some important aspects.

1 Like
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Hi Lizadams,

Sorry for my late reply! I wanted to know which BELD4 types could emit NO before and now I have resolved my question. Thanks for your help!

Best regareds,
Lingyun

5

Hi Hogrefe,

Sorry for my late reply! Thanks very much for your so specific advice! I will look at these codes you mentioned. Thanks!

Best regards,
Lingyun