The U.S. EPA Office of Research and Development and the Community Modeling and Analysis System Center are pleased to announce the release of CMAQ version 5.5.
What's new in CMAQv5.5?
Community Regional Atmospheric Chemistry Multiphase Mechanism (CRACMM) version 2 including updated formaldehyde chemistry impacting ozone and secondary organic aerosol formation
New support for running pre-configured global CMAQ simulations coupled with meteorology from the Model for Prediction Across Scales:- Atmosphere (MPAS-A)
Expanded capabilities of the Integrated Source Apportionment Method (ISAM) to quantify source contributions to total secondary organic aerosol (SOA) and individual species
Updates to ISAM source attribution estimates, mainly impacting coarse particles and secondary organic aerosols formed through cloud processes
Updates to the Decoupled Direct Method (DDM) to improve second order ozone sensitivities
Updated chemistry to properly capture photolysis effects from sub-grid clouds
Revised algorithms for modeling dry deposition (M3DRY and STAGE updates)
Improved accuracy and error checking for BDSNP soil NO in the MEGAN biogenic emissions algorithm
MCIP (meteorology pre-preprocessor) updates to grid origin definition for fine scale Lambert Conformal Grids (i.e., < 4km )
Updates to Sulfur Tracking Model (STM) to properly attribute sulfate from gas phase chemistry
Updates to the Explicit and Lumped Model Output (ELMO) synthesizer to fix erroneous output for several PM aggregates including PMF_OC, PMF_NCOM, TNO3
New shp2cmaq python tool to convert GIS shapefiles into gridded netCDF mask files that can be used for defining regions and region families with DESID and using geographic source regions when running CMAQ-ISAM
Simplified workflows for easier CMAQ installation
Important note for WRF-CMAQ users
Coupled WRF-CMAQv5.5 (Wong et al., 2010) is compatible with WRF versions 4.4 to 4.5.1. EPA's testing of WRF-CMAQ has included chemical mechanisms CB6r5 and CRACMMv1 with the M3DRY dry deposition scheme. Other model options can be used with the WRF-CMAQ model but will have limited user support for issues that are encountered.
See the full list of CMAQv5.5 updates on the EPA's new CMAQ Wiki page: CMAQ Wiki Page.
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