This chapter provides documentation on SMOKE’s quality assurance (QA) capabilities. Quality assurance of emissions modeling results is a very important component of using SMOKE. Because emission modeling is a complex procedure that includes many disparate data sets and many processing steps, it is critical that quality assurance be performed on the emissions modeling results prior to using the model-ready emissions in air quality modeling. Failure to quality assure the results will almost surely result in undesirable errors in SMOKE’s output caused by factors such as user inexperience, file formatting errors, misunderstanding of software capabilities, and software bugs. It is far preferable to catch emissions modeling problems during emissions modeling rather than after the emissions results have already been used and policy decisions made based on them.
SMOKE quality assurance consists of at least the following components:
Setting up SMOKE using available documentation (this manual) on file formats.
Reviewing log files for errors and warnings, then resolving any problems.
Reviewing reports generated by SMOKE core programs (e.g., reports from the Cntlmat program indicating which controls were applied and the changes made to the inventory emissions).
Reviewing and customizing reports generated by the Smkreport program, and comparing these to one another and to totals from the emission inventory.
In this chapter, we provide documentation on the Smkreport program (Section 5.2, “Smkreport Program”), on its main input file REPCONFIG (Section 5.3, “REPCONFIG Input File”), and on the Smkreport output reports (Section 5.4, “Reports Created by Smkreport”).