Advances in Simulating the Global Spatial Heterogeneity of Air Quality and Source Sector Contributions: Insights into the Global South.

Abstract

High-resolution simulations are essential to resolve fine-scale air pollution patterns due to localized emissions, nonlinear chemical feedbacks, and complex meteorology. However, high-resolution global simulations of air quality remain rare, especially of the Global South. Here, we exploit recent developments to the GEOS-Chem model in its high-performance implementation to conduct 1-year simulations in 2015 at cubed-sphere C360 (∼25 km) and C48 (∼200 km) resolutions. We investigate the resolution dependence of population exposure and sectoral contributions to surface fine particulate matter (PM2.5) and nitrogen dioxide (NO2), focusing on understudied regions. Our results indicate pronounced spatial heterogeneity at high resolution (C360) with large global population-weighted normalized root-mean-square difference (PW-NRMSD) across resolutions for primary (62-126%) and secondary (26-35%) PM2.5 species. Developing regions are more sensitive to spatial resolution resulting from sparse pollution hotspots, with PW-NRMSD for PM2.5 in the Global South (33%), 1.3 times higher than globally. The PW-NRMSD for PM2.5 for discrete southern cities (49%) is substantially higher than for more clustered northern cities (28%). We find that the relative order of sectoral contributions to population exposure depends on simulation resolution, with implications for location-specific air pollution control strategies.