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The Another Assimilation System for WRF-Chem (AAS4WRF): a new mass-conserving emissions pre-processor for WRF-Chem regional modelling
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  • Angel Vara Vela,
  • Angel Muñoz,
  • Arturo Lomas,
  • Carlos Mario Gonzalez,
  • Mario Gavidia Calderon,
  • Maria de Fatima Andrade
Angel Vara Vela

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Angel Muñoz
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Arturo Lomas
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Carlos Mario Gonzalez
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Mario Gavidia Calderon
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Maria de Fatima Andrade
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Abstract

The Weather Research and Forecasting with Chemistry (WRF-Chem) community model have been widely used for the study of pollutants transport, formation of secondary pollutants, as well as for the assessment of air quality policies implementation. A key factor to improve the WRF-Chem air quality simulations over urban areas is the representation of anthropogenic emission sources. There are several tools that are available to assist users in creating their own emissions based on global emissions information (e.g. anthro_emiss, prep_chem_src); however, there is no single tool that will construct local emissions input datasets for any particular domain at this time. Because the official emissions pre-processor (emiss_v03) is designed to work with domains located over North America, this work presents the Another Assimilation System for WRF-Chem (AAS4WRF), a ncl based mass-conserving emissions pre-processor designed to create WRF-Chem ready emissions files from local inventories on a lat/lon projection. AAS4WRF is appropriate to scale emission rates from both surface and elevated sources, providing the users an alternative way to assimilate their emissions to WRF-Chem. Since it was successfully tested for the first time for the city of Lima, Peru in 2014 (managed by SENAMHI, the National Weather Service of the country), several studies on air quality modelling have applied this utility to convert their emissions to those required for WRF-Chem. Two case studies performed in the metropolitan areas of Sao Paulo and Manizales in Brazil and Colombia, respectively, are here presented in order to analyse the influence of using local or global emission inventories in the representation of regulated air pollutants such as O3 and PM2.5. Although AAS4WRF works with local emissions information at the moment, further work is being conducted to make it compatible with global/regional emissions data file format. The tool is freely available upon request to the corresponding author.