Hi, I am a bit confused about the reliability of standalone mode (offline) CMAQ, as a science tool, especially for high resolution (finer than 3 or 2 km) regional modeling.
Does any governmental body uses CMAQ in the US (disregard the use by EPA for emissions inventory at county level coarse resolutions). What about the operational mode - is it being used, no matter at what resolution? Its not clear from the CMAQ webpage (I couldn’t understand).
Thanks
CMAQ is used widely by researchers and government staff. For a list of who uses CMAQ for EPA mission-related activities (e.g. State Implementation Plans, policy assessment, etc) see here:
CMAQ is very commonly run at 12km x 12km horizontal resolution. People do run CMAQ at ~1km x 1km horizontal resolution, and hemispheric CMAQ is run at 108km x 108 km. CMAQ is not run on a county scale. Emission inventories (processed to the grid) are used as input to CMAQ. NOAA’s National Air Quality Forecast Capability uses CMAQ in it’s system (see archived presentations at the CMAS conference for example).
Here are two additional examples of groups using CMAQ to perform air quality forecasting, I am sure there are many more:
Hi
I want to simulate air pollution with 500 m resolution. I couldn’t find anything in the user guide of CMAQ about the smallest resolution that CMAQ simulates. Could you tell me what is the smallest resolution in CMAQ, please?
Thanks
What do you want to simulate? I wonder if you have prepared such a high resolution input data? Only increasing resolution won’t work! The default data won’t work!
(my guess - hope others will reply!)