Towards chemical weather forecasting using CCATT-BRAMS in Chile: carbon monoxide in Santiago during summer.

Rodrigo Arroyo(1)*, Laura Gallardo(2), Karla Longo(3) ,Saulo Freitas(3), Marcelo Alonso(3)
(1) Chilean Weather Service, University of Chile, Casilla 140, Estacin Central, Chile (2) Center for Mathematical Modeling, University of Chile (CNRS UMI 2807), Casilla 170-3, Santiago, Chile (3) CPTEC/INPE, Brazil (*)Corresponding author: rarroyo@meteochile.cl

Model domain and observations

Coarse and fine domains Observations network

Introduction
The proposed work aims at implementing and validating the regional scale air quality model CCATT-BRAMS (Coupled Chemistry, Aerosol and Tracers Transport model to the Brazilian developments on the Regional Atmospheric Modeling System) over Central Chile for future use as a chemical weather forecasting tool. CCATT-BRAMS is a state-of-the-art on-line transport model fully consistent with the simulated atmospheric dynamics (Freitas et al., 2005 and 2007). As a first step, we analyze the model performance for simulating carbon monoxide (CO) over the Santiago basin. The model was fed with atmospheric boundary conditions from reanalysis fields from NOAA-NCEP. CO global emissions were taken from RETRO data, and the emission inventory for Santiago is temporally distributed considering a unimodal distribution with the maximum at 15 hour UTC. The model was run for the period January 07th and 19th, 2002. We use two domains with 32 vertical levels: a coarser domain with 15 km resolution and a finer one with 5 km. The results are compared with meteorological and air quality stations in the Santiago area.

Results Meteorological variables

Mean diurnal Temperature cycle ( C) Mallarauco La Platina CO horizontal distribution over Santiago basin (left panels) and latitudinal cross section (33.5 S, right panels), 2002 january 11th

CO: Spatial distribution

CO: Time series

Mallarauco (La Platina) is located outside (inside) of the basin. CCATT-BRAMS reproduces the main features of mean diurnal cycle, however it has difficulties capturing the extremes. This could happen because the humidity of the model is lower than observed (see below).
Mean diurnal Relative Humidity (%) El Paico El Manzano

Over all, relative humidity is underestimated. It could be a problem of choice of turbulence closure for this run, or too dry atmospheric initial conditions.
Mean diurnal wind vector (m/s) Lo Prado La Reina

The summer circulation over the Santiago basin is characterized by up-slope winds during the day and down-slope winds during the night. Accordingly, CO is transported down-wind from the main emission area, i.e., Santiago downtown. This is illustrated in the Figures above. In addition, the diurnal increase of PBL allows better atmospheric mixing conditions in the p.m. hours.
References Freitas, S. R., Longo, K. M., Silva Dias, M., Silva Dias, P., Chatfield, R., Prins, E., Artaxo, P., Grell, G., and Recuero, F.: Monitoring the transport of biomass burning emissions in South America, Environmental Fluid Mechanics, doi:10.1007/s10652005-0243-7, 5 (1-2), 135-167, 2005. Freitas S. R., Longo, K. M., Silva Dias, M.,, Chatfield R., Andreae M. O.,Artaxo P. , Grell G. Fazenda A., Rodrigues L. F., Panetta J.: The Coupled Aerosol and Tracer Transport model to the Brazilian developments on the Regional Atmospheric Modeling System. 1: model description and evaluation, submitted in 2007.

With the present configuration, the model captures the general geographical distribution with highest CO values downtown. However, the diurnal cycle is shifted as compared to the observations due to an inadequate prescription of the diurnal cycle of the emissions. Shortcoming in the characterization of the boundary layer, particularly at night may also be at play.

Future work: Explore different turbulence closures, and check initialization values. It is also necessary to adjust the emission diurnal cycle. Once the model has been optimized for CO (transport and mixing), we will run with full photochemistry .

The model description of the wind field is in agreement with the observations but again the extremes of the diurnal cycle are not always well captured.

Acknowledgements: Acknowledgements This work was carried out with the aid of a grant from the InterAmerican Institute for Global Change Research (IAI) CRN II 2017 which is supported by the US National Science Foundation (Grant GEO-0452325)