| Abstract: | Atmospheric chemistry models usually perform badly in forecasting wintertime air pollution because of their uncertainties. Generally, such uncertainties can be decreased effectively by techniques such as data assimilation(DA) and model output statistics(MOS). However, the relative importance and combined effects of the two techniques have not been clarified. Here,a one-month air quality forecast with the Weather Research and Forecasting-Chemistry(WRF-Chem) model was carried out in a virtually operational setup focusing on Hebei Province, China. Meanwhile, three-dimensional variational(3 DVar) DA and MOS based on one-dimensional Kalman filtering were implemented separately and simultaneously to investigate their performance in improving the model forecast. Comparison with observations shows that the chemistry forecast with MOS outperforms that with 3 DVar DA, which could be seen in all the species tested over the whole 72 forecast hours. Combined use of both techniques does not guarantee a better forecast than MOS only, with the improvements and degradations being small and appearing rather randomly. Results indicate that the implementation of MOS is more suitable than 3 DVar DA in improving the operational forecasting ability of WRF-Chem. |
