Time-stamp: "16:47BST on Tue 24 Apr 2007 by michael on ratty.phy.umist.ac.uk"

Our Work with CMAQ MADRID

Please also see general Models-3 discussion which is a more comprehensive discussion of the issues

In the early 2000s, various people noted that the aerosol physics in CMAQ Models-3 mesoscale model had room for improvement. They took the then current version of CMAQ, 4.2.1, and created a new development branch: CMAQ MADRID (Model of Aerosol Dynamics, Reaction, Ionization and Dissolution). modal and sectional representations of sulphate aerosols Whereas CMAQ uses log-normal distributions to model each aerosol's mass distribution, CMAQ MADRID uses a sectional (bins) approach which allows more processes (particle growth etc) to be captured in the model (see diagrams on the right).

There are two implementations of CMAQ MADRID:

The presumption, that we are testing, is that CMAQ MADRID gives more realistic modelling of aerosols than CMAQ. An initial comparison of CMAQ and CMAQ MADRID model predictions to actual measurements, for submicron nitrates on the East coast of the UK, has shown that the sectional approach gives a closer match. Also see

  1. July 2006 presentation to Polluted Troposphere Final Science Meeting (15Mb MS Powerpoint file)
  2. March 2006 presentation to ACCENT/NCAS/UWERN workshop
  3. May 2005 presentation to JEP (4Mb MS Powerpoint file) and associated covering text (15Kb MS Word Doc)
  4. Issues surrounding CMAQ MADRID for the UK grid

Example timeseries for submicron nitrate. Lines are measured during anticlockwise round-England flight and shaded areas are CMAQ MADRID model output:
figure as per above description

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