MOZART-4: Release, Publication, Forecasts
The global chemical transport model MOZART-4 has been recently released to the scientific community through the ACD MOZART-4 homepage and the NCAR Community Data Portal. The description of MOZART-4 has been submitted to the online journal Geoscientific Model Development [Emmons et al., 2009]. MOZART-4 is now being run in real-time to provide global chemical forecasts of tropospheric ozone and its precursors. The assimilation of MOPITT CO retrievals will be included in the near future to provide improved “chemical weather” predictions.
Results from MOZART-4 are being used by a number of groups for lateral boundary conditions to regional model simulations. 6-hour output files from a MOZART-4 simulation for 2004-2008 are available for download, allowing users to extract the dates and regions they need. The output files from the real-time simulation are also available. We have also developed a software package for incorporating chemical initial and boundary conditions in WRF-Chem from MOZART-4 output.
Figure 1:(Click image to view the animation.) A WRF-Chem simulation for June 2008 showing high amounts of ozone produced from wildfires. The high resolution WRF-chem results (12x12 km2) are plotted over the MOZART-4 simulation (0.7x0.7 deg horizontal resolution) that was used for boundary conditions. Circles are surface ozone measurements derived from EPA Aeromatic Information Retrieval System (AIRS) (EPA, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency air quality system data mart, available at http://www.epa.gov/ttn/airs/aqsdatamart ).
