Impact of chemical and meteorological boundary and initial conditions on air quality modeling: WRF-Chem sensitivity evaluation for a European domain

This study evaluates the impact of different chemical and meteorological boundary and initial conditions on the state-of-the-art Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model with its chemistry extension (WRF-Chem). The evaluation is done for July 2005 with 50 km horizontal resolution. The effect of monthly mean chemical boundary conditions derived from the chemical transport model LMDZ-INCA on WRF-Chem is evaluated against the effect of the preset idealized profiles. Likewise, the impact of different meteorological initial and boundary conditions (GFS and Reanalysis II) on the model is evaluated. Pearson correlation coefficient between these different runs range from 0.96 to 1.00. Exceptions exists for chemical boundary conditions on ozone and for meteorological boundary conditions on PM10, where coefficients of 0.90 were obtained. Best results were achieved with boundary and initial conditions from LMDZ-INCA and GFS. Overall, the European simulations show encouraging results for observed air pollutant, with ozone being the most and PM10 being the least satisfying.