In recent years, downscaling global models into regional models has gained popularity due to the need to understand climate change and air quality problems from regional perspectives. Government and policy makers rely on regional models to provide detailed analysis of the regions they are interested in. Traditional global model studies, such as long-range transport of air pollutants and future floods and droughts, have taken extra steps to integrate regional models into their global models through downscaling. A better representation of regional physics and chemical transport can be obtained with such integration. In this seminar, a comprehensive numerical modeling framework of Global Change and Air Pollution (GCAP) will be introduced as an example of downscaling application. The framework consists of two global models: including GISS General Circulation Model and GEOS-Chem Chemistry-Transport Model; coupled with regional meteorological model, MM5 (Mesoscale Meteorological model) and chemistry model, CMAQ (Community Multi-scale Air Quality Model) to investigate the impacts of future climate change to the ozone and PM2.5 air quality in 2050. Both climate and chemistry downscaling will be discussed in detail in this study. A brief discussion of expanding the idea of downscaling in various applications will be presented at the end of the seminar.
About the Speaker:
Dr. Nicky (Yun Fat) Lam is a post-doctoral research scientist in the department of Civil and Environmental Engineering (CEE) at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville in the U.S.A. He has been a trainer for climate and air quality models in the past few years for various government agencies, including Hong Kong Environmental Protection Department (HKEPD) and Asia Center for Air Pollution Research (ACAP). Dr. Lam received his BS (2001) in Civil Engineering, MS (2004) in Environmental Engineering and PhD (2010) in Civil Engineering in the department of CEE at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. He studied a variety of air quality researches including ambient air quality sampling, permitting, emission inventory development and future climate change modeling. Dr. Lam has published more than seven peer-reviewed publications with focuses on long-range transport of air pollutants, and regional climate and air quality modeling in the last two years. His research interests include regional climate and chemistry downscaling, future climate change, ozone stratosphere-troposphere exchange (STE) and Asian biomass burning.