Impact of a highly detailed emission inventory on modeling accuracy

During Expérience sur Site pour COntraindre les Modèles de Pollution atmosphérique et de Transport d'Emissions (ESCOMPTE) campaign (June 10 to July 14, 2001), two pollution events observed during an intensive measurement period (IOP2a and IOP2b) have been simulated. The comprehensive Regional Atmospheric Modeling Systems (RAMS) model, version 4.3, coupled online with a chemical module including 29 species is used to follow the chemistry of a polluted zone over Southern France. This online method takes advantage of a parallel code and use of the powerful computer SGI 3800. Runs are performed with two emission inventories: the Emission Pre Inventory (EPI) and the Main Emission Inventory (MEI). The latter is more recent and has a high resolution. The redistribution of simulated chemical species (ozone and nitrogen oxides) is compared with aircraft and surface station measurements for both runs at regional scale. We show that the MEI inventory is more efficient than the EPI in retrieving the redistribution of chemical species in space (three-dimensional) and time. In surface stations, MEI is superior especially for primary species, like nitrogen oxides. The ozone pollution peaks obtained from an inventory, such as EPI, have a large uncertainty. To understand the realistic geographical distribution of pollutants and to obtain a good order of magnitude in ozone concentration (in space and time), a high-resolution inventory like MEI is necessary. Coupling RAMS-Chemistry with MEI provides a very efficient tool able to simulate pollution plumes even in a region with complex circulations, such as the ESCOMPTE zone.