Recommendations on benchmarks for numerical air quality model applications in China – Part 1: PM<sub>2.5</sub> and chemical species

Huang, Ling; Zhu, Yonghui; Zhai, Hehe; Xue, Shuhui; Zhu, Tianyi; Shao, Yun; Liu, Ziyi; Emery, Chris; Yarwood, Greg; Wang, Yangjun; Fu, Joshua; Zhang, Kun; Li, Li

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-21-2725-2021

Articles | Volume 21, issue 4

https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-21-2725-2021

© Author(s) 2021. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Special issue:

Regional assessment of air pollution and climate change over...

https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-21-2725-2021

© Author(s) 2021. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Articles | Volume 21, issue 4

Research article

|

24 Feb 2021

Research article |

| 24 Feb 2021

Recommendations on benchmarks for numerical air quality model applications in China – Part 1: PM_2.5 and chemical species

Ling Huang, Yonghui Zhu, Hehe Zhai, Shuhui Xue, Tianyi Zhu, Yun Shao, Ziyi Liu, Chris Emery, Greg Yarwood, Yangjun Wang, Joshua Fu, Kun Zhang, and Li Li

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Final revised paper (published on 24 Feb 2021)
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Preprint (discussion started on 09 Jul 2020)

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Status: closed

AC: Author comment | RC: Referee comment | SC: Short comment | EC: Editor comment

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RC1: 'Comments on acp-2020-237', Anonymous Referee #1, 28 Jul 2020
- AC1: 'Preliminary reply to comments from anonymous referee #1', Ling Huang, 01 Aug 2020
RC2: 'Comments on acp-2020-237', Anonymous Referee #3, 06 Aug 2020
RC3: 'review', Anonymous Referee #2, 12 Aug 2020

Peer-review completion

AR: Author's response | RR: Referee report | ED: Editor decision

AR by Ling Huang on behalf of the Authors (28 Oct 2020) Author's response Manuscript

ED: Referee Nomination & Report Request started (29 Oct 2020) by Yafang Cheng

RR by Anonymous Referee #3 (11 Nov 2020)

RR by Anonymous Referee #1 (15 Nov 2020)

Suggestions for revision or reasons for rejection

Thanks for your revision, which addressed my concerns in part, but there are still some important issues have not been totally addressed. And I think, these issues could be critical for making this work valuable for other studies in future and therefore shaping this work be suitable for publishing in ACP.

1) Authors include GEOS-Chem and conclude that GEOS-Chem’s performance is less satisfied due to its relative coarse resolution leading to insufficient resolve details in interactions between emission and chemistry in a city-scale. Then, could authors provide more discussion in the manuscript to stress the necessary/advance of fine-res. models could be a promising trend of future air quality modelling studies to help improve our understanding.

2) I do not object to your reply-02, however, reply-02 still did not address my question. Ozone is the central pollutant of photochemistry. And you do not talk a work about ozone in this manuscript, whose title highlight the “photochemical”. Here is an example. A manuscript entitled “How deadly is COVID-19?”, but it only talks about how to develop a vaccine, do not mention a word of global number of confirmed cases and death toll. Do you think this is a good title reflect the content presented? So, my point is, either title is not suitable or ozone need to be discussed.

3) I do not agree that evaluation of meteorology is a “standalone scientific question”. First, as suggest by author in the conclusion that performance of meteorology simulation can directly influence air quality simulation. Second, as replied by authors to Reviewer-02:
“Consequently, errors in inputs and algorithms present in this group of simulations are likely to be correlated (e.g., tendency for higher emissions correlated with more dispersive meteorological simulations), which will hinder reliable diagnosis of factors contributing to model error.”
Exactly, a good air quality simulation can be achieved for wrong reasons when meteorological performance is poor, this will hind the reasons of uncertainty and hamper improvement in our understanding.
So, a convincing evaluation of air pollutants should always build on the top the evaluation of meteorology. I suggest to include meteorology in the work. If authors do insist to separate them, then at least, the meteorology evaluation work should publish first, and this work can cite it and build on the top of it.

4) in reply-04, authors state “Our resultsindicate that the top three factorsinvolve emission inventory, grid resolution, and boundary conditions,while the choice of model and source of meteorology areleast important. This is a very preliminary analysis and thus we have decided to include these discussions in the supporting materials.”.
I think this is the most important part of the present work, it could be the unique contribution to the modelling community and hence a unique value of this work. We do want to have detailed discussions and promote the discussions to main text. Even though there are limitations, we could still have discussions of these limitations (all studies have limitations) and the uncertainties, and provide valuable advices for future studies to overcome these limitations. Put this part in SI really under value the present work.

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ED: Reconsider after major revisions (18 Nov 2020) by Yafang Cheng

AR by Ling Huang on behalf of the Authors (25 Dec 2020) Author's response Author's tracked changes Manuscript

ED: Referee Nomination & Report Request started (30 Dec 2020) by Yafang Cheng

RR by Anonymous Referee #1 (13 Jan 2021)

ED: Publish subject to minor revisions (review by editor) (16 Jan 2021) by Yafang Cheng

AR by Ling Huang on behalf of the Authors (18 Jan 2021) Author's response Author's tracked changes Manuscript

ED: Publish as is (21 Jan 2021) by Yafang Cheng

AR by Ling Huang on behalf of the Authors (22 Jan 2021) Manuscript

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Short summary

Numerical air quality models (AQMs) are being applied extensively to address diverse scientific and regulatory compliance associated with deteriorating air quality in China. For any AQM applications, model performance evaluation is a critical step that guarantees the robustness and reliability of the baseline modeling results and subsequent applications. We provided benchmarks for model performance evaluation of AQM applications in China to demonstrate model robustness.

Recommendations on benchmarks for numerical air quality model applications in China – Part 1: PM2.5 and chemical species

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Recommendations on benchmarks for numerical air quality model applications in China – Part 1: PM_2.5 and chemical species