Sensitivity Analysis of the Mesoscale Air Pollution Model TAPM

Abstract: Known problems with the air pollution model, TAPM’s meteorological predictions over the Canterbury Plains, New Zealand, has been its lack of ability to simulate low nocturnal stagnant wind speeds, certain wind field directions as well as greatly overestimating the sensible heat flux. The aim of this thesis has been to reduce these known disagreements along with other meteorological parameters in attempt to optimize TAPM’s predictions for New Zealand conditions. The methodology used to obtain better agreement with observational data during a four-day period (1-4 of August 2000) was to modify certain initial parameters. These parameters were the deep soil volumetric moisture content, the deep soil temperature, the sea surface temperature, the synoptic pressure gradient scaling factor, and to include rain processes or not in the simulations. It is found that including rain processes and increasing the deep soil volumetric moisture content (at least during wintertime) do improve the simulations performance.