Information on Running MOVES2014b
EPA's MOtor Vehicle Emission Simulator (MOVES) is a state-of-the-science emission modeling system that estimates emissions for mobile sources at the national, county, and project level for criteria air pollutants, greenhouse gases, and air toxics. In general, modelers should use EPA’s latest model, MOVES3, to take advantage of the improvements that have been included in it.
This page summarizes important information on running MOVES2014b.
Note: If you are using MOVES2014b and have not yet updated it to use MariaDB, please reinstall MOVES2014b following these instructions. The new installer replaces MySQL with MariaDB as the database server for MOVES2014b. MariaDB continues to support features that MOVES relies on, whereas the latest versions of MySQL removed these features. Using MariaDB resolves various problems that users have found with recent installations of MOVES2014b, including an error where some particulate matter (PM) emissions may be dropped with no error message, sometimes leading to low PM output from MOVES installed with MySQL 5.7.26 or later. For these reasons, it is critical to reinstall MOVES2014b to eliminate this potential error.
MOVES Error in Multi-County Nonroad Equipment Run--EPA recommends modeling Nonroad Emissions with Single-County Runs. (November 2019)
- EPA's Office of Transportation and Air Quality has confirmed that a multi-county nonroad run of the MOtor Vehicle Emission Simulator (MOVES) sometimes produces incorrect results with no error warnings.
- At this time, we have only replicated this problem with one run specification and have not been able to diagnose the specific cause of the error. However, we believe that the error is associated with the large size of the run and encourage MOVES users to break large (multiple-county) nonroad runs into small (single-county) runs.
- The problem was seen in a nonroad run of MOVES2014b where the Region was set to "County" and many counties were selected, with Output Emission Detail set to "State." The only indication of the problem was that state total emissions were much less than expected and were less than the sum of individual county runs. The problem occurred only on some of the computers tested.
- Note that this problem has not been seen in MOVES runs for onroad vehicles, in nonroad runs for a single county, nor in nonroad runs where "Region" is set to "Nation."
- Because the MOVES output for the run appears normal, with no missing values, error messages, or indications in the log file, it may be difficult to recognize this problem if it appears. Thus, we suggest that modelers using MOVES2014b to estimate emissions from nonroad equipment run MOVES with multiple single county runs and aggregate emissions with post-processing as needed. Batch runs and post-processing scripts may ease this process. Please contact us at mobile@epa.gov for more information if needed.