Estimation of OH in urban plumes using TROPOMI-inferred NO2 ∕ CO

Abstract

Abstract. A new method is presented for estimating urban hydroxyl radical (OH) concentrations using the downwind decay of the ratio of nitrogen dioxide over carbon monoxide column-mixing ratios (XNO2/XCO) retrieved from the Tropospheric Monitoring Instrument (TROPOMI). The method makes use of plumes simulated by the Weather Research and Forecast model (WRF-Chem) using passive-tracer transport, instead of the encoded chemistry, in combination with auxiliary input variables such as Copernicus Atmospheric Monitoring Service (CAMS) OH, Emission Database for Global Atmospheric Research v4.3.2 (EDGAR) NOx and CO emissions, and National Center for Environmental Protection (NCEP)-based meteorological data. NO2 and CO mixing ratios from the CAMS reanalysis are used as initial and lateral boundary conditions. WRF overestimates NO2 plumes close to the center of the city by 15 % to 30 % in summer and 40 % to 50 % in winter compared to TROPOMI observations over Riyadh. WRF-simulated CO plumes differ by 10 % with TROPOMI in both seasons. The differences between WRF and TROPOMI are used to optimize the OH concentration, NOx, CO emissions and their backgrounds using an iterative least-squares method. To estimate OH, WRF is optimized using (a) TROPOMI XNO2/XCO and (b) TROPOMI-derived XNO2 only. For summer, both the NO2/CO ratio optimization and the XNO2 optimization increase the prior OH from CAMS by 32 ± 5.3 % and 28.3 ± 3.9 %, respectively. EDGAR NOx and CO emissions over Riyadh are increased by 42.1 ± 8.4 % and 101 ± 21 %, respectively, in summer. In winter, the optimization method doubles the CO emissions while increasing OH by ∼ 52 ± 14 % and reducing NOx emissions by 15.5 ± 4.1 %. TROPOMI-derived OH concentrations and the pre-existing exponentially modified Gaussian function fit (EMG) method differ by 10 % in summer and winter, confirming that urban OH concentrations can be reliably estimated using the TROPOMI-observed NO2/CO ratio. Additionally, our method can be applied to a single TROPOMI overpass, allowing one to analyze day-to-day variability in OH, NOx and CO emission.