Photochemical Process Modeling and Analysis of Ozone Generation

Abstract

Air pollution in modern city and industrial zones has become a serious public concern in recent years in China. Significance of air quality assessment and emission control strategy design is increasing. Most studies in China focus on particulate matter (PM), especially PM2.5, while few account for photochemical secondary air pollutions represented by ozone (O3). In this paper, a procedure for air quality simulation with comprehensive air quality model with extensions (CAMx) is demonstrated for studying the photochemical process and ozone generation in the troposphere. As a case study, the CAMx photochemical grid model is used to model ozone over southern part of Beijing city in winter, 2011. The input parameters to CAMx include emission sources, meteorology field data, terrain definition, photolysis status, initial and boundary conditions. The simulation results are verified by theoretical analysis of the ozone generation tendency. The simulated variation tendency of domain-wide average value of hourly ozone concentration coincides reasonably well with the theoretical analysis on the atmospheric photochemical process, demonstrating the effectiveness of the procedure. An integrated model system that cooperates with CAMx will be established in our future work.