ABSTRACT
Achieving high resolution in air pollution models is a difficult challenge because of the large number of species present in the atmosphere. The number of chemical rate equations that need to be solved rises with the number of species, and for high resolution 3-dimensional calculations, detailed chemical schemes can become prohibitively large. The range of reaction time-scales often leads to stiff systems of differential equations which require more expensive implicit numerical solvers. Previous work has shown [31, 32, 33, 12, 13] that coarse horizontal resolution can have the effect of increasing horizontal diffusion to values many times greater than that described by models, resulting in the smearing of pollutant profiles and an underestimation of maximum concentration levels. A review paper by Peters et al. [22] highlights the importance of developing more efficient grid systems for the next generation of air pollution models in order to “capture important smaller-scale atmospheric phenomena.”
