WRF-GC (v1.0): online coupling of WRF (v3.9.1.1) and GEOS-Chem (v12.2.1) for regional atmospheric chemistry modeling – Part 1: Description of the one-way model
Name
gmd-13-3241-2020.pdf
Description
Published version
Size
4.49 MB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
08cd9e674ae1ff0e345da35dd3aa58b8
Author(s)
Lin, Haipeng
Feng, Xu
Fu, Tzung-May
Tian, Heng
Ma, Yaping
Zhang, Lijuan
Jacob, Daniel J
Yantosca, Robert M
Sulprizio, Melissa P
Lundgren, Elizabeth W
Date Issued
July 16, 2020
Journal
Geoscientific Model Development
Publisher
Copernicus GmbH
Citation
Lin, H., Feng, X., Fu, T.-M., Tian, H., Ma, Y., Zhang, L., Jacob, D. J., Yantosca, R. M., Sulprizio, M. P., Lundgren, E. W., Zhuang, J., Zhang, Q., Lu, X., Zhang, L., Shen, L., Guo, J., Eastham, S. D., and Keller, C. A.: WRF-GC (v1.0): online coupling of WRF (v3.9.1.1) and GEOS-Chem (v12.2.1) for regional atmospheric chemistry modeling – Part 1: Description of the one-way model, Geosci. Model Dev., 13, 3241–3265.
Version
Final published version
Abstract
We developed the WRF-GC model, an online coupling of the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) mesoscale meteorological model and the GEOS-Chem atmospheric chemistry model, for regional atmospheric chemistry and air quality modeling. WRF and GEOS-Chem are both open-source community models. WRF-GC offers regional modellers access to the latest GEOS-Chem chemical module, which is state of the science, well documented, traceable, benchmarked, actively developed by a large international user base, and centrally managed by a dedicated support team. At the same time, WRF-GC enables GEOS-Chem users to perform high-resolution forecasts and hindcasts for any region and time of interest. WRF-GC uses unmodified copies of WRF and GEOS-Chem from their respective sources; the coupling structure allows future versions of either one of the two parent models to be integrated into WRF-GC with relative ease. Within WRF-GC, the physical and chemical state variables are managed in distributed memory and translated between WRF and GEOS-Chem by the WRF-GC coupler at runtime. We used the WRF-GC model to simulate surface PM2.5 concentrations over China during 22 to 27 January 2015 and compared the results to surface observations and the outcomes from a GEOS-Chem Classic nested-China simulation. Both models were able to reproduce the observed spatiotemporal variations of regional PM2.5, but the WRF-GC model (r=0.68, bias =29 %) reproduced the observed daily PM2.5 concentrations over eastern China better than the GEOS-Chem Classic model did (r=0.72, bias =55 %). This was because the WRF-GC simulation, nudged with surface and upper-level meteorological observations, was able to better represent the pollution meteorology during the study period. The WRF-GC model is parallelized across computational cores and scales well on massively parallel architectures. In our tests where the two models were similarly configured, the WRF-GC simulation was 3 times more efficient than the GEOS-Chem Classic nested-grid simulation due to the efficient transport algorithm and the Message Passing Interface (MPI)-based parallelization provided by the WRF software framework. WRF-GC v1.0 supports one-way coupling only, using WRF-simulated meteorological fields to drive GEOS-Chem with no chemical feedbacks. The development of two-way coupling capabilities, i.e., the ability to simulate radiative and microphysical feedbacks of chemistry to meteorology, is under way. The WRF-GC model is open source and freely available from http://wrf.geos-chem.org (last access: 10 July 2020).
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Laboratory for Aviation and the Environment
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-13-3241-2020
