Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
the interactions of climate and air-quality issues. In the region of Central and
Eastern Europe (CEE) the need for high resolution studies is particularly important,
that is why 10 km resolution has been introduced in the EC FP6 project CECILIA.
The main aim of the project dealing with climate change impacts and vulnerability
assessment in targeted areas of CEE is the application of regional climate modelling
studies at a resolution of 10 km for local impact studies in key sectors of the region.
The project is covering studies on hydrology, water quality and water management,
agriculture and forestry as well as air quality issues in urban and industrialized
areas (e.g. Black Triangle - a polluted region around the common borders of the
Czech Republic, Poland and Germany).
The concentration of air pollutants depends on both anthropogenic and climate
factors. However, in this study the anthropogenic emission are kept for all the time
slices at the values of year 2000 to study climate effects. Longer range transport to
the target regions is taken into account from simulation for the whole Europe
using RCM with the resolution of 50 × 50 km. These simulations are used to
constrain nested higher resolution runs (10 × 10 km) focusing in CEE both for
present and future climate. The key species are ozone, sulphur, nitrogen and PM,
which have a central role in tropospheric chemistry as well as the strong health
impacts.
It is now well established that climatically important (radiatively active) gases
and aerosols can have substantial climatic impact trough their direct and indirect
effects on radiation, especially on regional scales (Qian and Giorgi, 2000; Qian
et al., 2001; Giorgi et al., 2002). To study these effects requires coupling of regional
climate models with atmospheric chemistry/aerosols to assess the climate forcing
to the chemical composition of the atmosphere and its feedback to the radiation,
eventually other components of the climate system. In this study climate is calcu-
lated using model RegCM while chemistry is solved by model CAMx. The model
RegCM was originally developed and further improved by Giorgi et al. (1999) or
later see e.g. in Pal et al. (2007). For more details on the use of the model see
Elguindi at al. (2006).
CAMx is an Eulerian photochemical dispersion model developed by ENVIRON
Int. Corp. (Environ, 2006). In version 4.40 CAMx is used for air quality modeling
here, with CB-IV gas phase chemistry mechanism option, wet deposition of gases
and particles. It uses mass conservative and consistent transport numerics in parallel
processing. It allows for integrated “one-atmosphere” assessments of gaseous and
particulate air pollution (ozone, PM2.5, PM10, air toxics) over many scales
ranging from sub-urban to continental. CAMx simulates the emission, dispersion,
chemical reactions and removal of pollutants in the troposphere by solving the
pollutant (eulerian) continuity equation for each chemical species on a system of
nested three-dimensional grids. These processes are strongly dependent on the
meteorological conditions, therefore CAMx requires meteorological input from a
NWP model or RCM for successful run.
