Quality assuring SMOKE emissions includes a combination of (1) steps performed by SMOKE programs and (2) postprocessing steps performed by the user.
The SMOKE components that play a role in quality assurance consist of the following:
The various SMOKE programs perform file format checks of all input files to ensure that the files can be read. The programs write errors and warnings if files cannot be read properly.
SMOKE gives error and warning messages about inventory data that are not complete or are invalid, and about problems or possible problems combining the inventory data with the support files.
Core SMOKE programs create reports, such as the area-to-point report provided by Smkinven and the control reports provided by Cntlmat.
The Smkreport program reports emissions totals at various levels of data aggregation. This reporting capability currently allows you to generate reports of emissions by source, SCC, region (e.g., state, county, or user-defined region), road class, layer, hour, grid cell, speciation profile, gridding surrogate code, temporal profile, and elevated status. The most powerful reporting feature is that you can combine these reporting resolutions in any combination. In addition, reports can be created at each stage of processing (import, gridding, speciation, temporal allocation, layer assignment) or any combination of stages.
Smkreport can combine information from any SMOKE intermediate files (e.g., intermediate inventory file, speciation matrix, gridding
matrix) to create emissions reports. One input file to Smkreport, called the REPCONFIG file, instructs Smkreport on how many and which reports to create. The REPCONFIG file contains a series of instructions that can be set by the user to control the contents of the reports. More details about
Smkreport and the REPCONFIG are provided in Section 5.2, “Smkreport Program” and Section 5.3, “REPCONFIG Input File”.
The second major component of quality assuring the SMOKE emissions processing involves users taking steps to evaluate the information/reports provided by SMOKE. These steps include:
Check that the correct settings have been selected in the run scripts, including the settings that control which SMOKE programs are run.
Check the log files from all SMOKE programs for errors and warnings. Errors will keep the programs from running successfully, so the source of the error must be identified and repaired. Warnings may indicate that a problem exists that needs to be addressed, or warnings can be ignored if they are not something that will impact the results for the particular inventory of interest.
Compare the emissions totals provided by Smkreport (e.g., by state and county) to totals of the emissions inventories computed outside of SMOKE. Also, compare the emissions totals from SMOKE between each of the processing stages. For example, for area sources, compare the emissions after inventory import, gridding, chemical speciation, temporal allocation, and final merge to ensure that the emissions are consistent from step to step. This involves some subjectivity because the emissions do in fact change from step to step, and the magnitude of those changes depends on the support input files SMOKE uses with the inventory.
Check that the correct chemical speciation profiles, temporal profiles, and gridding surrogates were applied, using reports that provide this information from Smkreport.
Perform other specific checks of Smkreport outputs, such as ensuring that the correct major point sources are in the inventory, comparing population-normalized emissions among the counties, and checking stack parameters from point sources.
Ensure that the emissions data look reasonable by viewing them in the Visualization Environment for Rich Data Interpretation (VERDI).
Chapter 5, SMOKE Quality Assurance provides much additional detail about how to proceed with quality assuring your inventories and emissions processing.