Identification

Title

Boundary layer versus free tropospheric CO budget and variability over the United States during summertime

Abstract

The regional Weather Research and Forecasting Model with Chemistry (WRF-Chem) version 3.2 is used to analyze the carbon monoxide (CO) budget and spatiotemporal variability over the United States in summer 2008. CO tracers for different emission sources are used to separate the modeled CO fields into the contributions from individual sources (pollution inflow to the model domain, chemical production within the model domain, and local emissions by type). The implementation of tagged CO tracers into WRF-Chem constitutes an innovative aspect of this work. We evaluate WRF-Chem CO concentrations using aircraft, satellite, and surface observations. The model reproduces fairly well the observed CO concentrations for the entire altitude range but tends to underestimate fire emissions and overestimate anthropogenic sources and CO from pollution inflow. Evaluation results also show that the model gives a good representation of background CO mixing ratios with mean biases better than ∼15 ppbv in the free troposphere (FT) and less than 20 ppbv toward the surface. The analysis of the CO budget over the contiguous United States shows that at the surface, CO from inflow is the dominant source, with a mean relative contribution of 63 ± 19%. Anthropogenic and photochemically produced CO contribute to surface CO to a lesser extent (18 ± 14% and 14 ± 8%, respectively). The average contribution from fire emissions to surface CO during the period examined is small (2 ± 5%) but can have a large impact in certain regions and times. Similar trends are found in the planetary boundary layer (PBL). In the FT, the average CO relative contributions are estimated as 84 ± 12% for CO from inflow, 5 ± 4% for anthropogenic CO, 9 ± 7% for photochemically produced CO, and 1 ± 5% for CO from fires. Using WRF-Chem simulations, we also examine the representation of surface and PBL CO concentration variability that would be captured by current near infrared (NIR) and thermal infrared (TIR) satellite observations. We find that CO total columns are impacted by variability in the lowermost troposphere (LMT) at the -10% level, indicating limited sensitivity for air quality applications. The same is generally true for the FT CO column obtained from TIR measurements, although this does provide a good measure for capturing the pollution inflow variability and is therefore valuable in providing initial and boundary conditions to constrain regional models. We further analyze the situations under which the LMT concentrations obtained from recently demonstrated multispectral (NIR + TIR) observations capture the surface CO variability.

Resource type

document

Resource locator

Unique resource identifier

code

http://n2t.net/ark:/85065/d70c4wdk

codeSpace

Dataset language

eng

Spatial reference system

code identifying the spatial reference system

Classification of spatial data and services

Topic category

geoscientificInformation

Keywords

Keyword set

keyword value

Text

originating controlled vocabulary

title

Resource Type

reference date

date type

publication

effective date

2016-01-01T00:00:00Z

Geographic location

West bounding longitude

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Temporal reference

Temporal extent

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Dataset reference date

date type

publication

effective date

2012-02-23T00:00:00Z

Frequency of update

Quality and validity

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Conformity

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version of format

Constraints related to access and use

Constraint set

Use constraints

Limitations on public access

None

Responsible organisations

Responsible party

contact position

OpenSky Support

organisation name

UCAR/NCAR - Library

full postal address

PO Box 3000

Boulder

80307-3000

email address

opensky@ucar.edu

web address

http://opensky.ucar.edu/

name: homepage

responsible party role

pointOfContact

Metadata on metadata

Metadata point of contact