6.8. Movesmrg

6.8.1. Description
6.8.2. Processing Order
6.8.3. Files and Environment Variables

6.8.1. Description

Processing categories: mobile

Movesmrg is a new, mobile-sources-only program, loosely based on the SMOKE program Smkmerge, that combines the intermediate files produced by the other SMOKE programs (i.e., SmkInven, Grdmat, Spcmat, Temporal). The movesmrg program is discussed in detail in Section 6.8, “Movesmrg. Similar to Smkmerge, the main goal of Movesmrg is to create (1) gridded, speciated, hourly air quality model-ready input files and (2) county-level SCC summaries. The primary difference between Movesmrg and Smkmerge is that Movesmrg uses the SMOKE Formatted MOVES emission rate lookup tables to compute emissions on the fly, by multiplying the emissions factors by hourly VMT (for RPD) or by monthly or annual vehicle populations (for RPV or RPP).

Movesmrg must be run three times to compute on-roadway and off-network (including vapor venting) emissions processes individually, since the emission rate calculation methods in SMOKE for these categories are quite different. Once all three emissions processes have been computed, the emission output files can be merged (optionally along with other 2 D sectors separate from onroad) using Mrggrid, which combines any number of 2 D or 3 D hourly, gridded, and speciated emission data files. See the section Section 6.10, “Mrggrid for more details on the above programs.

  • RPD and RPV Emission Calculations

    For its RPD and RPV lookup table calculations, Movesmrg uses the gridded hourly temperatures in GMT, and then adjusts the hour of the RPD and RPV lookup tables from local time to GMT to get the emission rates for the reference county for the appropriate month. The key lookup fields for the factors are hourly temperature and avarage speed for the RPD lookup table calculation, and hourly temperature and hour of the day in local time for the RPV table calculation.

  • RPP Emission Calculations

    For the RPP lookup table calculations, Movesmrg uses the RPP lookup table as an input file for the emission rates that depend not on the gridded hourly temperatures, but on the temperature profiles output by the Met4moves program. The emissions estimates based on the RPP table are computed for the temporal averaging period specified for the temperature profiles, rather than using hourly gridded meteorology.