RELEASE_NOTES for CMAQv4.6 - 30 Sep 2006


The changes and new features of this release are:

1)  Aerosols
      - Updated ISORROPIA to v1.7 (includes correction in activity
        coefficients for temperatures other than 298 K)
      - Revised to use T, RH-dependent “gamma” (heterogeneous N2O5
        reaction probability) from Evans & Jacob (2005)
      - Upper limit set for the relative humidity input to ISORROPIA (95%)
      - Updated parameters written to the aerosol diagnostic file

2)  Chemistry
      - Carbon Bond (CB05) mechanism and associated EBI solver
      - Include the gas-phase reactions involving N2O5 and H2O
      - Removed obsolete mechanism combinations (e.g. gas+aerosols w/o
        aqueous)

3)  PBL modeling
      - New ACM2: combined non-local and local closure scheme

4)  Plume-in-Grid
      - Capability for AE4 mechanisms

5)  Mercury
      - Capability for CB05, AE4 mechanism (see MERCURY_NOTES)

6)  Hazardous Air Pollutants
      - Increased number of gas-phase HAPs; added several toxic metals
        and diesel components in particulate material (adapted for CB05
        and SAPRC99 chemical mechanisms, and AE4)

7)  Carbon Apportionment 
      - Added capability for the CB05 mechanism

8)  Sulfate Tracking
      - Added capability for:  CB05, AE4 mechanisms; and "cloud_acm" module

9)  CGRID Restart File
      - Added a CGRID restart file (used to initialize next day's
        simulation; permits flexibility in the “CONC” file; can write
        subset of species and layers for the CONC file)

10)  Parallel I/O library
      - Various updates (new version required for CMAQv4.6 compilation)

11) Other
      - Added a utility program to convert MCIP data into HYSPLIT format