Introduction
In the past 3 years, we have been involved
in a broad investigation of the character of lake breezes in Southern Ontario and their
effects on summer severe weather and the local or regional transport of air pollutants
such as ozone. Data from the SOMOS
field project (1993) and the ELBOW field project
(1997) provide the observational basis for our studies.
The need for accurate prediction of local air pollutants such as ozone arises in both industry and the public services. One of the major practical problems is to determine the transport mechanisms of ozone, especially in local areas like Toronto. An example of a model tracer study (David Sills, 1998), suggests that motions within the lake breeze circulation can dominate the local transport of ozone and that the initial level at which the ozone resides is very important.
The MC2 mesoscale model that was employed for simulations in those studies was found to be a versatile, robust and powerful tool. MC2, the non-hydrostatic Mesoscale Compressible Community limited-area atmospheric model is widely used in Canada for high-resolution atmospheric research (Benoit et al., 1997). It has been coupled to a set of sophisticated physics parameterization schemes. A one-way nesting procedure allows the model to make very high-resolution simulations starting from coarser resolution operational analysis as initial conditions.
The goal of the present study is to evaluate the ability of the high
resolution MC2 model, and to simulate local meteorological fields at a resolution of up to
1 km. Due to its self-nesting feature, MC2 can be used for high resolution simulations
initialized with coarse resolution analysis fields at a reasonable computational
cost.
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