HERMES_GR

HERMES_GR (High-Elective Resolution Modelling Emission System - Global-Regional) is an open-source, Python-based emission processing system designed to transform officially reported emission inventories into model-ready datasets for air quality and greenhouse gas (GHG) simulations.

It provides high-resolution spatial, temporal, vertical, and chemical speciation processing, enabling integration with state-of-the-art atmospheric models for research and regulatory applications.

HERMES_GR can write NetCDF emission output files following the conventions of the CMAQ, MONARCH, and WRF-Chem atmospheric chemistry models.

Main Features

• End-to-end emission processing framework from inventory ingestion to CTM-ready outputs.
• Flexible domain definition for global and regional domains, including global, regular latitude-longitude, rotated latitude-longitude, rotated nested, Mercator, and Lambert conformal conic grids.
• Multi-inventory processing for global and regional emission inventories covering multiple source types, pollutants, and base years, with user-defined scaling and masking factors for inventory adjustment and combination.
• Advanced temporal allocation using default or user-defined profiles, including spatially gridded temporal factors to represent local variability such as temperature-dependent emissions.
• Vertical distribution through literature-based or user-defined vertical profiles for emission injection heights by sector.
• Chemical speciation from base pollutants into user-defined gas-phase and aerosol chemical mappings.
• Parallel execution with MPI-based domain decomposition for efficient HPC workflows and large-scale simulations.
• CTM-compatible outputs through generic NetCDF files and model-specific NetCDF conventions for CMAQ, MONARCH, and WRF-Chem.

Dependencies

HERMES_GR requires the software and Python packages listed in environment.yml. The recommended installation path uses Conda and includes MPI-enabled builds for packages such as NetCDF4 and HDF5.

Key dependencies include:

• Python 3.10
• MPI-enabled libnetcdf, netCDF4, and h5py
• mpi4py
• numpy, geopandas, shapely, pyproj, rasterio, and gdal
• eccodes and python-eccodes
• configargparse, pyyaml, openpyxl, holidays, and numba

Quick Start

Clone the repository and install the full Conda environment with the provided Makefile:

git clone https://github.com/BSC-ES/HERMES_GR.git
cd HERMES_GR
make full_installation

For advanced installation on HPC systems, see the installation guide.

Running HERMES_GR

HERMES_GR is run from the command line with a configuration file:

hermes_gr --my-config /path/to/your_config.ini

Parameters can be defined in the INI file or overridden through the command line. When a parameter is defined in both places, the command-line value takes precedence.

Configuration details are available in the HERMES_GR configuration guide.

Documentation

Full documentation is available in the project Wiki, including:

• User guide and configuration
• Input file formats
• Installation guide
• Short examples
• Change log

Availability and License

HERMES_GR is distributed under the Apache License 2.0.

How to Cite

If you use HERMES_GR in your research, please cite the software release as the primary reference:

Tena, C., Gehlen, J., Rizza, L., & Guevara, M. (2026).
HERMES_GR: High-Elective Resolution Modelling Emission System - Global-Regional
(version v3.0.0). BSC Dataverse.
https://doi.org/10.82201/TQF44A

For the scientific methodology and model description, please also cite Guevara et al. (2019):

Guevara, M., Tena, C., Porquet, M., Jorba, O., and Pérez García-Pando, C.:
HERMES, a stand-alone multi-scale atmospheric emission modelling framework - Part 1:
global and regional module, Geosci. Model Dev., 12, 1885-1907,
https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-12-1885-2019, 2019.

Paper link: https://gmd.copernicus.org/articles/12/1885/2019/

Related Resources

• Software DOI: https://doi.org/10.82201/TQF44A
• Methodology paper: https://gmd.copernicus.org/articles/12/1885/2019/
• Source code: https://github.com/BSC-ES/HERMES_GR
• Documentation: https://github.com/BSC-ES/HERMES_GR/wiki
• Benchmark data: https://dataverse.bsc.es/dataset.xhtml?persistentId=perma:BSC/WQ1714

Contact and Support

For questions, support, or contributions:

• Carles Tena - carles.tena@bsc.es
• Marc Guevara - marc.guevara@bsc.es
• Johanna Gehlen - johanna.gehlen@bsc.es
• Luca Rizza - luca.rizza@bsc.es

Contributions are welcome via GitHub pull requests.