WRF-Chem simulations of CO2, CH4 and CO over Belgium and Western Europe v2

This data set contains the hourly WRF-Chem v4.1.5 model output over two nested domains centered around Belgium. The inner domain has a horizontal resolution of 3 x 3 km and covers Belgium and part of its neighbouring countries. The parent domain has a horizontal resolution of 9 x 9 km and covers a large part of Western Europe.

The simulation period is from 1 June 2018 until 1 September 2018. The model output files are in NetCDF format and contain a wide range of meteorological variables as well as concentration fields for CO2, CH4 and CO split in different tracers depending on the source sector: background, anthropogenic, biogenic, ocean etc.

The meteorological and chemical initial and lateral boundary conditions are taken from ECMWF ERA5 and CAMS reanalysis (egg4, eac4). Several anthropogenic inventories are implemented in separate tracers: EDGAR (v2024 for CO2 and CH4, v8.1 for CO), CAMS-REG-ANT v8.0 and TNO_GHGco. Moreover, there are two additional tracers per species where vertical source-specific emissions profiles are applied to EDGAR and CAMS-REG-ANT based on Brunner et al., 2019. Biogenic CO2 fluxes are calculated online based on VPRM, with vegetation indices from MODIS, the Copernicus Dynamic Land Cover Collection 3 (Buchhorn et al., 2020) with a high spatial resolution of 100 m and the parameter table from Glauch et al. (2025). Biomass buring emissions are from the Fire INventory from NCAR (FINN v2.5, Wiedinmyer at al. 2023)), CH4 wetlands emissions are from WetCHARTs (Bloom et al., 2017) and CO2 ocean exchange from Landschützer et al. (2019) (https://doi.org/10.25921/9hsn-xq82).

Remark that there was an offset added to the uptake tracer fields: 50 ppm for CO2_BIO and CO2_OCE, and 1.8 ppm for CH4_BIO. This should be subtracted when processing the data.

The corresponding namelist.input text file is also provided.

These simulations have been made in the context of the BELSPO BRAIN 2.0 project “VERBE” (Towards a greenhouse gas emission monitoring and VERification system for BElgium, https://verbe.aeronomie.be/ , 2022-2026).

Size: around 9 GB per day