Systematic Review of Tropospheric Ozone Modeling Using Community Multiscale Air Quality Model (CMAQ)

Abstract

Ozone (O3) is a secondary pollutant, and modeling studies used to assess its behavior play a role in facilitating regulatory and decision-making processes in public policies. Thus, the Community Multiscale Air Quality (CMAQ), a chemical transport model, was specifically designed to simulate and forecast O3 concentrations. This critical review includes publications between 2016 and 2023 showing the most used configurations. The research was carried out in the Scopus and Web of Science databases, and the articles were filtered using determined criteria. With this, it was observed that the most used model arrangements are Weather Research and Forecasting as a meteorological model, carbon bond 2005 as the chemical mechanism, 36 × 36 km with 35 vertical layers as grid resolution, CMAQ standard profiles as a boundary condition, Multi-resolution Emission Inventory for China, due to the high number of publications by Chinese researchers, and Model of Emissions of Gases and Aerosols from Nature as inventory and processor of biogenic emissions, respectively. It is concluded that this arrangement of configurations is the most widespread in the literature but shows that nowadays the publications predominantly lie over China and with greater prominence of this country in studies of influence on ozone simulation.