The detailed emissions scaling, isolation, and diagnostic (DESID) module in the Community Multiscale Air Quality (CMAQ) modeling system version 5.3.2

Abstract

Air quality modeling for research and regulatory applications often involves executing many emissions sensitivity cases to quantify impacts of hypothetical scenarios, estimate source contributions, or quantify uncertainties. Despite the prevalence of this task, conventional approaches for perturbing emissions in chemical transport models like the Community Multiscale Air Quality (CMAQ) model require extensive offline creation and finalization of alternative emissions input files. This workflow is often time-consuming, error-prone, inconsistent among model users, difficult to document, and dependent on increased hard disk resources. The Detailed Emissions Scaling, Isolation, and Diagnostic (DESID) module, a component of CMAQv5.3 and beyond, addresses these limitations by performing these modifications online during the air quality simulation. Further, the model contains an Emission Control Interface which allows users to prescribe both simple and highly complex emissions scaling operations with control over individual or multiple chemical species, emissions sources, and spatial areas of interest. DESID further enhances the transparency of its operations with extensive error-checking and optional gridded output of processed emission fields. These new features are of high value to many air quality applications including routine perturbation studies, atmospheric chemistry research, and coupling with external models (e.g., energy system models, reduced-form models).