Porting the WRF model to eumedgrid and simulation of air quality in urban zones

Abstract

The Weather Research and Forecast (WRF) is a specific program for forecasting and research. WRF processing is composed of three steps: pre-processing, core model execution and postprocessing. WRF/Chem is the WRF coupled with Chemistry. The model simulates the coupling between atmospheric dynamics, radiation and chemistry, and is used for investigation of regional-scale air quality, field program analysis, and cloud-scale interactions between clouds and chemistry. WRF/Chem can predict transport of atmospheric constituents and radiation of O3 and UV. The WRF/Chem processing requires high execution time and storage space. The porting to Grid Computing can be very advantageous since the model supports hybrid distributed and shared memory computations. The Grid platforms used for this study are MaGrid and EumedGrid. MaGrid is linked to EumedGrid, and users can have access to appropriate CPU and storage resources. The Grid Computing abundant resources enable multiple scenarios to run in parallel, and the MPI parallel programming model allows execution time to decrease substantially with increasing the number of Worker Nodes. In addition, for most scenarios' simulations, numerical grid can be more refined especially in sensitive regions, leading to a higher degree of accuracy in the results. In this study, the WRF/Chem is ported to Grid computing, and is used to simulate emissions of pollutants in the North of Morocco. © Copyright owned by the author(s) under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike License.