What’s Happening Now - 2024 Holiday Quiz Answers
Below are the questions and correct answers to last month’s Holiday Quiz. Correct answers are in bold.
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When running the AERSURFACE program, what three kinds of data files are needed as inputs?
- a. ISHD, FSL, and ASOS
- b. Potential to emit, permit allowable, and startup/shutdown
- c. Land cover, impervious cover, and canopy cover
- d. Excel, SAS, and Word
- e. ChatGPT, Claude, and Open AI
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Eulerian is to CMAQ as lagrangian is to
- a. ZZ Top
- b. NetCDF
- c. SCREEN3
- d. CalPuff
- e. ALOHA
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What are two ways in which AERMOD can generate source culpability?
- a. MAXDCONT file and EVENT model
- b. Urban and rural
- c. Gaussian plume equation and Briggs plume rise equations
- d. Run or Not
- e. Binary and ASCII
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What are three techniques in AERMOD that are used to estimate NO2 concentrations from total NOX emissions?
- a. Ambient ratio method 2, differentiation, and integration
- b. Fluid modeling, equivalent building dimensions, and rulemaking
- c. Confidence intervals, chi-squared tests, and correlation coefficients
- d. Titration, filtration, and oxygenation
- e. Ozone limiting method, Plume volume molar ratio method, and General reaction set method
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IGRA is an acronym for an upper air data format. What does IGRA stand for?
- a. Integrated Global Radiosonde Archive
- b. Internal General Radiosonde Availability
- c. Integrated Grand Radiosonde Archive
- d. International Global Radiohead Album
- e. Incredibly Generic Radiosonde Archive
New AERSURFACE Modeling Tip of the Month - Providence Oris
As you might imagine, any time a new version of a program is released, there may still be some hiccups for users. EPA has recognized this and has released an errata sheet for the recent updates to the AERMOD system. One such hiccup we’ve heard about lately concerns running the new version of AERSURFACE. Users have downloaded land cover, impervious cover, and tree canopy cover from the Multi-Resolution Land Characteristics (MRLC) website, and when they try to run AERSURFACE, they get an error message. This is because the MLRC data was recently updated and does not include the Albers Equal Area projection parameters for tree canopy cover data. Although AERSURFACE prompts the user to enter these parameters when missing, AERSURFACE doesn’t recognize them. The AERSURFACE errata information indicates that there are two ways to work around this:
- Use the 2021 edition of the NLCD files available on the EPA FTP site. The 2021 edition is available for the 2011, 2013, 2016, 2019, and 2021 NLCD years. The files on the FTP site are separated by EPA region and include either the entire region, part of the region, or part of a single state in a few cases (e.g., CA, TX), depending on the geographic size of the region/states. This data works with AERSURFACE as is and is sufficient if you don’t need any data newer than 2021.
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The second workaround is to use software such as GDAL to rewrite the canopy TIFF file downloaded from the MRLC to add the necessary projection parameters to the file. The EPA has put together a zip file, “GDAL_MRLC_canopy_preprocessor.zip”, containing the GDAL Warp utility (gdalwarp.exe) and associated library and data files required to add the Albers projection parameters to the canopy TIFF files within the CONUS. The zip file can be found here.
