Simulation of Air Quality Over South Korea Using the WRF-Chem Model: Impacts of Chemical Initial and Lateral Boundary Conditions

Abstract

There is an increasing need to improve the air quality over South Korea to protect public health from local and remote anthropogenic pollutant emissions that are in an increasing trend. Here, we evaluate the performance of the WRF-Chem (Weather Research and ForecastingChemistry) model in simulating near-surface air quality of major Korean cities, and investigate the impacts of time-varying chemical initial and lateral boundary conditions (IC/BCs) on the air quality simulation using a chemical downscaling technique. The model domain was configured over the East Asian region and anthropogenic MICS-Asia 2010 emissions and biogenic MEGAN-2 emissions were applied with RACM gaseous chemistry and MADE/SORGAM aerosol mechanism. Two simulations were conducted for a 30-days period on April 2010 with chemical IC/BCs from the WRF-Chem default chemical species profiles ('WRF experiment') and the MOZART-4 (Model for OZone And Related chemical Tracers version 4) ('WRF_ MOZART experiment'), respectively. The WRF_ MOZART experiment has showed a better performance to predict near-surface CO, NO2, SO2, and O-3 mixing ratios at 7 major Korean cities than the WRF experiment, showing lower mean bias error (MBE) and higher index of agreement (IOA). The quantitative impacts of the chemical IC/BCs have depended on atmospheric residence time of the pollutants as well as the relative difference of chemical mixing ratios between the WRF and WRF_ MOZART experiments at the lateral boundaries. Specifically, the WRF_ MOZART experiment has reduced MBE in CO and O3 mixing ratios by 60 similar to 80 ppb and 5 similar to 10 ppb over South Korea than those in the WRF-Chem default simulation, while it has a marginal impact on NO2 and SO2 mixing ratios. Without using MOZART-4 chemical IC, the WRF simulation has required approximately 6-days chemical spin-up time for the East Asian model domain. Overall, the results indicate that realistic chemical IC/BCs are prerequisite in the WRF-Chem simulation to improve a forecast skill of local air quality over South Korea, even in case the model domain is sufficiently large to represent anthropogenic emissions from China, Japan, and South Korea.