Holidays that fall on weekdays can have different activity patterns than regular weekdays because commercial and commuting activities are altered. Temporal uses the HOLIDAYS file to identify which user-defined dates should be processed as holidays and to determine which day of the week (Saturday or Sunday) to use to model the holiday. Usually, holidays are modeled as if they were a Sunday; this attempts to account for things like plants being closed and traffic patterns being different. Of course, you can also set up specific temporal profile inputs for a specific holiday and model that day separately, but this is not automated in SMOKE. Users therefore simply pick Saturday or Sunday as an alternative date treatment in the hope that it will somewhat better represent the emissions than using a weekday.

Holidays processing happens automatically if you are running the Temporal program for every day of your episode. If you are using the Monday-weekday-Saturday-Sunday approach described in Section 2.9.6, “Monday, weekday, Saturday, Sunday processing”, then additional scripting steps must be taken to ensure that the holidays are modeled properly. In particular, for inventories that span multiple time zones and/or when the output time zone is not the same as at least one time zone in the inventory, the scripts must be configured to model the holiday and the next day, so that the final hours in the holiday that are west of the output time zone will be included in the next day’s file.