Application of WRF Model for Air Quality Modelling and AERMOD - A Survey

ABSTRACT

Meteorology plays a crucial role in air quality. The presence of uncertainties of a significant nature in the meteorological profile used during air quality model simulation has the potential to affect negatively the results of the simulations. This paper describes a most recent version of the meteorological model called Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model and its importance in air quality. The performance of WRF depends upon the intended application and parameterization scheme of physics options. WRF model is also applied to investigate the simulation results with various land surface models (LSMs) and Planetary Boundary Layer (PBL) parameterizations and various set of microphysics options. It predicts various meteorological spatial parameters like mixing layer height, temperature, humidity, rain fall, cloud cover and wind. The WRF results are integrated with air quality model (AQM) and the AQM depends upon the performance of WRF. It has been applied for evaluation of national pollution control policy, behaviour of plume rise, property of aerosols, prediction of Ozone, SO₂, NO_x, PM₁₀, PM_2.5 etc. using AQM for various sources. The effect of topography and different seasons on the concentration of pollutants in the atmosphere has also been studied using AQM. AQM AERMOD has also been reviewed with various other AQM models such as ADMS-Urban and CALPUFF. AERMOD has been used for different time scales, health risk assessment, evaluation of various control strategies, Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) studies and emission factor estimation. This paper presents the importance of meteorological model to AQM as well as many applications of AQM to demonstrate various scientific questions and policies.