Abstract
The Potential Source Contribution Function (PSCF) model has been successfully used for identifying regions of emission source at a long distance in this study, the PSCF model relies on backward trajectories calculated by the Hybrid Single-Particle Lagrangian Integrated Trajectory (HYSPLIT) model. In this study, we investigated the impacts of grid resolution and Planetary Boundary Layer (PBL) parameterization (e.g., turbulent transport of pollutants) on the PSCF analysis. The Mellor-Yamada-Janjic (MYJ) and Yonsei University (YUS) parameterization schemes were selected to model the turbulent transport in the PBL within the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF version 3.6) model. Two separate domain grid sizes (83 and 27 km) were chosen in the WRF downscaling in generating the wind data for driving the HYSPLIT calculation. The effects of grid size and PBL parameterization are important in incorporating the influence of regional and local meteorological processes such as jet streaks, blocking patterns, Rossby waves, and terrain-induced convection on the transport of pollutants by a wind trajectory. We found high resolution PSCF did discover and locate source areas more precisely than that with lower resolution meteorological inputs. The lack of anticipated improvement could also be because a PBL scheme chosen to produce the WRF data was only a local parameterization and unable to faithfully duplicate the real atmosphere on a global scale. The MYJ scheme was able to replicate PSCF source identification by those using the Reanalysis and discover additional source areas that was not identified by the Reanalysis data. A potential benefit for using high-resolution wind data in the PSCF modeling is that it could discover new source location in addition to those identified by using the Reanalysis data input.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 146-154 |
| Number of pages | 9 |
| Journal | Atmospheric Environment |
| Volume | 137 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Jul 1 2016 |
Bibliographical note
Publisher Copyright:© 2016 Elsevier Ltd.
Funding
This work was unfunded and performed by the authors at their own time, there were no conflicts of interest. The authors acknowledge the Canadian Environment Canada for making the Alert data available on the NAtChem web site ( http://www.ec.gc.ca/natchem/ ) and the Air Resources Laboratory of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration for making the HYSPLIT model available online at http://ready.arl.noaa.gov/HYSPLIT.php . Oak Ridge National Laboratory is managed by UT-Battelle, LLC, for the U. S. Department of Energy under Contract No. DE-AC05-00OR22725. This manuscript has been authored by UT-Battelle, LLC under Contract No. DE-AC05-00OR22725 with the US Department of Energy. The United States Government retains and the publisher, by accepting the article for publication, acknowledges that the United States Government retains a non-exclusive, paid-up, irrevocable, world-wide license to publish or reproduce the published form of this manuscript, or allow others to do so, for United States Government purposes. The Department of Energy will provide public access to these results of federally sponsored research in accordance with the DOE Public Access Plan ( http://energy.gov/downloads/doe-public-access-plan ).
| Funders | Funder number |
|---|---|
| U.S. Department of Energy | DE-AC05-00OR22725 |
| Oak Ridge National Laboratory |
Keywords
- Aerosol
- Arctic
- Black carbon
- Climate change
- Downscale
- WRF