Preliminary evaluation of the Community Multiscale Air Quality model for 2002 over the Southeastern United States.

Abstract The Visibility Improvement State and Tribal Association of the Southeast (VISTAS) is one of five Regional Planning Organizations that is charged with the management of haze, visibility, and other regional air quality issues in the United States. The VISTAS Phase I work effort modeled three episodes (January 2002, July 1999, and July 2001) to identify the optimal model configuration(s) to be used for the 2002 annual modeling in Phase II. Using model configurations recommended in the Phase I analysis, 2002 annual meteorological (Mesoscale Meterological Model [MM5]), emissions (Sparse Matrix Operator Kernal Emissions [SMOKE]), and air quality (Community Multiscale Air Quality [CMAQ]) simulations were performed on a 36‐km grid covering the continental United States and a 12‐km grid covering the Eastern United States. Model estimates were then compared against observations. This paper presents the results of the preliminary CMAQ model performance evaluation for the initial 2002 annual base case simula...