The new and open source CONCEPT (CONsolidated Community Emissions Processing Tool) Emissions Processor is under development to support the development of State Implementation Plans for fine particles, regional haze, and ozone by state and local agencies. The CONCEPT emissions model is funded by Midwest RPO and by joint RPO funding, and is being developed by Alpine Geophysics, with contributions ENVIRON Corporation, and staff associated with the University of California at Riverside Air Quality Modeling Group. It is also designed in such a method that it can be easily applied to anywhere in the world. A white paper on the new model discusses how to assess the usefulness of emissions modeling systems by highlighting the characteristics such as (1) quality control; (2) transparency; (3) performance; and (4) open source.
This CONCEPT emissions model will cover the development of the four base emissions models: point sources, area sources, on-road mobile sources, and biogenic emissions. Additional supporting sub-models will include: gridding surrogates model, chemical speciation model, point and area source growth/control model, nonroad model, and ammonia model. In developing this model, the best attributes of SMOKE, EMS-2003, and EPS will be used. The model will be built with a modular design, so that common activities, like temporalization, speciation, or spatial allocation, can use the same tools, whenever possible, and new modules may be added with relative ease in the future. A comprehensive suite of QA tools will be incorporated into the model.
The model is being written primarily in Postgres SQL. The exception is MOBILE6 where pre-existing Fortran code exists. Other programs/tools used will be GNU Public License (GPL) code compliant. A comprehensive User's Guide and a five-day training course will be developed as part of the project.
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