The effect of emission source chemical profiles on simulated PM_2.5 components: sensitivity analysis with the Community Multiscale Air Quality (CMAQ) modeling system version 5.0.2

Abstract

A chemical transport model (CTM) is an essential tool for air quality prediction and management, widely used in air pollution control and health risk assessment. However, the current models do not perform very well in reproducing the observations of some major chemical components, for example, sulfate, nitrate, ammonium and organic carbon. Studies have suggested that the uncertainties in the model chemical mechanism, source emission inventory and meteorological field can cause inaccurate simulation results. Still, the emission source profile (used to create speciated emission inventories for CTMs) of PM2.5 has not been fully taken into account in current numerical simulation. Based on the characteristics and variation rules of chemical components in typical PM2.5 sources, different simulation scenarios were designed and the sensitivity of simulated PM2.5 components to the source chemical profile was explored. Our findings showed that the influence of source profile changes on simulated PM2.5 components' concentrations cannot be ignored. Simulation results of some components were sensitive to the adopted source profile in CTMs. Moreover, there was a linkage effect: the variation in some components in the source profile would bring changes to the simulated results of other components. These influences are connected to chemical mechanisms of the model since the variation in species allocations in emission sources can affect the potential composition and phase state of aerosols, chemical reaction priority, and multicomponent chemical balance in thermodynamic equilibrium systems. We also found that the perturbation of the PM2.5 source profile caused variation in simulated gaseous pollutants, which indirectly indicated that the perturbation of source profile would affect the simulation of secondary PM2.5 components. Our paper highlights the necessity of paying enough attention to the representativeness and timeliness of the source profile when using CTMs for simulation.