An Investigation of the Factors Affecting the Ozone Concentrations in an Urban Environment

Abstract

Adjoint sensitivity analysis allows to assess the areas that have the largest impact on a given receptor site. The adjoint version of the Community Multiscale Air Quality (CMAQ v4.5) model was employed to perform a sensitivity analysis of ground level ozone for the episodic event of June 24, 2003, in the city of Athens assuming as a receptor site that of Agia Paraskevi Station. The 3-dimensional meteorology fields calculated using the Mesoscale Model 5 (MM5, Penn State University version 3.7.2) were used to produce high resolution daily air emissions inventories for the main anthropogenic and biogenic pollutants with 1-hour time step by an in-house built processor named EMISLAB. The meteorological prediction fields in combination with the emissions inventories were consequently fed as inputs to the CMAQ model. The ozone sensitivities were obtained with respect to pollutant concentrations and emissions. The distribution of the sensitivities in the computational domain for different times delineated the regions where perturbations in some concentrations would result in significant changes in the ozone concentrations in the area of interest (Agia Paraskevi, in this case) at the final time. The investigation yielded that the most significant influences were the transported O3 and NOx concentrations from the industrial area in the northern parts of the city and the road traffic from the city centre.