The Effect of the Chemical Lateral Boundary Conditions on CMAQ Simulations of Tropospheric Ozone for East Asia

The goal of this study is to investigate the effects of the chemical lateral boundary conditions (CLBCs) on Community Multi-scale Air Quality (CMAQ) simulations of tropospheric ozone for East Asia. We developed linking tool to produce CLBCs of CMAQ from Goddard Earth Observing System-Chemistry (GEOS-Chem) as a global chemistry model. We examined two CLBCs: the fixed CLBC in CMAQ (CLBC-CMAQ) and the CLBC from GEOS-Chem (CLBC-GEOS). The ozone fields by CMAQ simulation with these two CLBCs were compared to Tropospheric Emission Spectrometer (TES) satellite data, ozonesonde and surface measurements for May and August in 2008. The results with CLBC-GOES showed a better tropospheric ozone prediction than that with CLBC-CMAQ. The CLBC-GEOS simulation led to the increase in tropospheric ozone concentrations throughout the model domain, due to be influenced high ozone concentrations of upper troposphere and near inflow western and northern boundaries. Statistical evaluations also showed that the CLBC-GEOS case had better results of both the index of Agreement (IOA) and mean normalized bias. In the case of IOA, the CLBC-GEOS simulation was improved about 0.3 compared to CLBC-CMAQ due to the better predictions for high ozone concentrations in upper troposphere.