Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
6.6 Regional Climate Change Impacts on Air Quality
in High Resolution
Tomas Halenka, Peter Huszar, and Michal Belda
Charles University, Department of Meteorology and Environment Protection,
V Holesovickach 2, 180 00 Prague, Czech Republic
Abstract
The coupling of regional climate model and chemistry/aerosol model
has been performed recently on the Department of Meteorology and Environmental
Protection, Faculty of Mathematics and Physics, Charles University in Prague, for
the EC 6FP Project QUANTIFY and finally for EC 6FP Project CECILIA. One
objective of the latter, aiming to study climate change impacts in Central and
Eastern Europe based on very high resolution simulations using regional climate
models (RCM) in 10 km grid, is dealing with climate change impacts on air
quality. Chemistry is solved by model CAMx which is coupled to model RegCM.
As the first step, the distribution of pollutants is simulated off-line for four time
slices of 10 years in the model couple. Period of 1991-2000 driven by reanalysis
ERA40 is used for validation whereas control run 1991-2000 driven by global
model ECHAM5 is used for comparison basis and estimate of systematic error
imposed by GCM, future time slices 2041-2050 and 2091-2100 provide the
information on climate change impact on future air quality. The comparison to the
driving simulations in 50 km resolution shows the benefit of high resolution runs
in more detailed description of emissions and surface processes.
Keywords
Regional climate modeling, air-quality modeling, climate change impact
on air quality
1. High Resolution Modelling and Air Quality
In many applications, particularly related to the assessment of climate-change
impacts, the information on surface climate change at regional to local scale is
fundamental and that is Global Circulation Models (GCMs) can hardly reproduce
reasonably well. Thus, dynamical downscaling, i.e., nesting of a fine scale limited
area model (or Regional Climate Model, RCM) within the GCM is the most
convenient tool taking into account processes critically affected by topography
and land use at high resolution in this kind of studies and especially when aiming