Evaluation of on-road vehicle CO and NOx National Emission Inventories using an urban-scale source-oriented air quality model

Abstract

The MOBILE6.2 model was replaced by the Motor Vehicle Emission Simulator (MOVES) in 2012 as an official tool recommended by the United States Environmental Protection Agency (US EPA) to predict vehicular pollutant emission factors. In this study, on-road vehicle emission inventories of CO and NOx for Southeast Texas generated by MOVES and MOBILE6.2 in two versions of the 2005 National Emission Inventory (NEI) were studied by comparing predicted CO and NOx using the EPA's Community Multiscale Air Quality (CMAQ) Model incorporated with a source-oriented gas phase chemical mechanism with measurements made at six urban and industrial sites in Southeast Texas. The source tracing technique allows direct determination of contributions of on-road vehicles to overall CO and NOx concentrations and identification of ambient concentration measurements which are mostly impacted by vehicle emissions.By grouping the fractional bias (FB) values of the hourly predictions based on vehicle contributions to total CO or NOx concentrations, clear trends in the FB were observed, indicating systematic biases in the emission inventory for these species. Data points dominated by vehicle emissions suggest that surface CO concentrations due to vehicle exhaust are significantly over-estimated by a factor of 2 using either MOVES or MOBILE6.2. NOx concentrations are overestimated by approximately 20–35% and 70% by using the MOBILE6.2 and MOVES emissions, respectively. Emission scaling runs show that a domain-wide reduction of MOBILE6.2 CO emissions by 60% and NOx emissions by 15–25% leads to better model performance of exhaust CO and NOx concentrations in the current study.