Articles | Volume 14, issue 5
https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-14-2867-2021
https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-14-2867-2021
Model evaluation paper
 | 
20 May 2021
Model evaluation paper |  | 20 May 2021

The Community Multiscale Air Quality (CMAQ) model versions 5.3 and 5.3.1: system updates and evaluation

K. Wyat Appel, Jesse O. Bash, Kathleen M. Fahey, Kristen M. Foley, Robert C. Gilliam, Christian Hogrefe, William T. Hutzell, Daiwen Kang, Rohit Mathur, Benjamin N. Murphy, Sergey L. Napelenok, Christopher G. Nolte, Jonathan E. Pleim, George A. Pouliot, Havala O. T. Pye, Limei Ran, Shawn J. Roselle, Golam Sarwar, Donna B. Schwede, Fahim I. Sidi, Tanya L. Spero, and David C. Wong

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Cited articles

Appel, K. W., Gilliam, R. C., Davis, N., Zubrow, A., and Howard, S. C.: Overview of the Atmospheric Model Evaluation Tool (AMET) v1.1 for evaluating meteorological and air quality models, Environ. Modell. Softw., 26, 434–443, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.envsoft.2010.09.007, 2011. 
Bachmann, J. D.: Will the Circle Be Unbroken: A History of the U.S. National Ambient Air Quality Standards, J. Air Waste Manage., 57, 652–697, 2007. 
Bash, J. O., Cooter, E. J., Dennis, R. L., Walker, J. T., and Pleim, J. E.: Evaluation of a regional air-quality model with bidirectional NH3 exchange coupled to an agroecosystem model, Biogeosciences, 10, 1635–1645, https://doi.org/10.5194/bg-10-1635-2013, 2013. 
Byun, D. and Schere, K. L.: Review of the governing equations, computational algorithms, and other components of the Models-3 Community Multiscale Air Quality (CMAQ) modeling system, Appl. Mech. Rev., 59, 51–77, 2006. 
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Short summary
This paper details the scientific updates in the recently released CMAQ version 5.3 (and v5.3.1) and also includes operational and diagnostic evaluations of CMAQv5.3.1 against observations and the previous version of the CMAQ (v5.2.1). This work was done to improve the underlying science in CMAQ. This article is used to inform the CMAQ modeling community of the updates to the modeling system and the expected change in model performance from these updates (versus the previous model version).