The SMOKE Emission Processor and Community Multi-Scale Air Quality Model (CMAQ) applied to Southern Ontario

As part of an ongoing effort to develop regional-scale air quality modelling capabilities for photo-oxidants and atmospheric aerosols in Canada, the 1995 emission inventories for the US and eastern Canada were processed through the Sparse Matrix Operator Kernel Emissions Model (SMOKE). This was done to prepare gridded, temporalized and speciated emissions for use in the Community Multi-Scale Air Quality Model (CMAQ). SMOKE is a state-of-the-art emission inventory processing system recently developed by the MCNC Supercomputing Center in North Carolina, and CMAQ is an atmospheric chemistry/transport model developed by the US EPA and currently incorporated into their MODELS-3 modelling framework. This is the first time that the 1995 emission inventory for Canada has been processed with SMOKE. The emissions were processed to permit simulation of several scenarios so that issues of trans-boundary pollutant transport and the impact of coal-fired power plants on regional air quality in Southern Ontario could be explored. A July 1999 smog episode that produced elevated levels of ozone and PM2.5 in Southern Ontario has been used as the test case for this study. This paper describes the many challenges that were encountered in gridding, temporalizing and speciating the Canadian emission inventory and presents some of the results of both the emission processing and the air quality modelling.