Korea Emissions Inventory Processing Using the US EPA’s SMOKE System

Abstract

Emissions inputs for use in air quality modeling of Korea were generated with the emissions inventory data from the National Institute of Environmental Research (NIER), maintained under the Clean Air Policy Support System (CAPSS) database. Source Classification Codes (SCC) in the Korea emissions inventory were adapted to use with the U.S. EPA's Sparse Matrix Operator Kernel Emissions (SMOKE) by finding the best-matching SMOKE default SCCs for the chemical speciation and temporal allocation. A set of 19 surrogate spatial allocation factors for South Korea were developed utilizing the Multi-scale Integrated Modeling System (MIMS) Spatial Allocator and Korean GIS databases. The mobile and area source emissions data, after temporal allocation, show typical sinusoidal diurnal variations with high peaks during daytime, while point source emissions show weak diurnal variations. The model-ready emissions are speciated for the carbon bond version 4 (CB-4) chemical mechanism. Volatile organic carbon (VOC) emissions from painting related industries in area source category significantly contribute to TOL (Toluene) and XYL (Xylene) emissions. ETH (Ethylene) emissions are largely contributed from point industrial incineration facilities and various mobile sources. On the other hand, a large portion of OLE (Olefin) emissions are speciated from mobile sources in addition to those contributed by the polypropylene industry in point source. It was found that FORM (Formaldehyde) is mostly emitted from petroleum industry and heavy duty diesel vehicles. Chemical speciation of PM2.5 emissions shows that PEC (primary fine elemental carbon) and POA (primary fine organic aerosol) are the most abundant species from diesel and gasoline vehicles. To reduce uncertainties in processing the Korea emission inventory due to the mapping of Korean SCCs to those of U.S., it would be practical to develop and use domestic source profiles for the top 10 SCCs for area and point sources and top 5 SCCs for on-road mobile sources when VOC emissions from the sources are more than 90% of the total.