The Mbsetup program’s second major task is to preprocess the information about the spatial and temporal averaging approach for meteorology data, as previously introduced in Section 2.8.4.8, “Use of gridded meteorology data”. Using the county settings input file (MVREF), Mbsetup determines both the spatial and temporal averaging for each county. All assignments are made by reference county; this means that all counties assigned the same reference county must use the same averaging approaches.

The MVREF file also allows you to set how to handle rural and urban local roads, and you have the choice of using MOBILE6 local roads or using arterial roads with your local road speeds. When reading the file, Mbsetup checks to be sure that the reference county FIPS code and the three settings (spatial averaging, temporal averaging, and local road handling) are all integers. The program gives an error for any duplicate reference counties in the file. Any lines with reference counties that are not in the MCREF file are ignored. Finally, Mbsetup checks that all reference counties have been assigned settings.

Mbsetup creates the time period group files (DAILYGROUP, WEEKLYGROUP, MONTHLYGROUP, and/or EPISODEGROUP) based on the settings in the MVREF file. These SMOKE intermediate files are used by Premobl to determine what type of meteorology averaging is used for each inventory county. Each file contains a list of the inventory counties using that type of averaging (e.g., counties in the DAILYGROUP file will use daily temperature and humidity profiles), along with the reference county for that inventory county and the local road setting (this setting is not related to meteorology averaging, but needs to be read by Emisfac later on). If no counties use a particular type of averaging, the corresponding *GROUP file will not be created by Mbsetup.