Chemistry

NCAR scientists and software engineers are developing a new portable and robust infrastructure for building and maintaining chemistry schemes. The model independent chemistry module (MICM) is being built to allow chemistry schemes (including calculation of photolysis rates and rate constants, and solving the chemistry ODEs) to be maintained in one place yet applied in any atmosphere model.

For more information, see the Model Independent Chemistry Module web page.

NCAR and community partners are developing the Multiscale Infrastructure for Chemistry and Aerosols (MUSICA) in connection with SIMA. Version 0 of MUSICA is CAM-Chem configured with regional refinement over the conterminus U.S. To create MUSICAv0, an emissions tool was built to regrid emission inventories from the latitude-longitude and point source emissions datasets onto the unstructured model grid mesh of CAM Spectral Element with regional refinement. This emissions tool is being applied to both anthropogenic and fire emissions. Current MUSICAv0 simulations use a grid mesh with global horizontal grid spacing of 1˚ that refines to 0.125˚ (~14km) over the conterminous U.S. Simulation output is being evaluated with observations gathered in several field campaigns during 2013 (DISCOVER-AQ-CA, DISCOVER-AQ-TX, SAS, SEAC4RS, SOAS, and SENEX) and U.S. EPA CASTNET and AirData air quality monitoring data. Preliminary results from these simulations show that ozone and ozone precursors are generally improved at finer horizontal resolution (14 km) compared to both the field campaign and monitoring data.

Visit the MUSICA website for more information.