Abstract
Surface ozone pollution has been a persistent environmental problem in the US and Europe as well as the developing countries. A key prerequisite to find effective alternatives to meeting an ozone air quality standard is to understand the importance of local anthropogenic emissions, the significance of biogenic emissions, and the contribution of long-range transport. In this study, an air quality modeling system that includes chemistry and transport, CMAQ, an emission processing model, SMOKE, and a mesoscale numerical meteorological model, WRF, has been applied to investigate an ozone event occurring during the period of the 1996 Paso del Norte Ozone Campaign. The results show that the modeling system exhibits the capability to simulate this high ozone occurrence by providing a comparable temporal variation of surface ozone concentration at one station and to capture the spatial evolution of the event. Several sensitivity tests were also conducted to identify the contributions to high surface ozone concentration from eight VOC subspecies, biogenic VOCs, anthropogenic VOCs and long-range transportation of ozone and its precursors. It is found that the reductions of ETH, ISOP, PAR, OLE and FORM help to mitigate the surface ozone concentration, and like anthropogenic VOCs, biogenic VOC plays a nonnegligible role in ozone formation. But for this case, long-range transport of ozone and its precursors appears to produce an insignificant contribution.
Highlights
Ozone (O3) is of concern due to its adverse effects on both human health and the environment.Breathing ozone can trigger a variety of health problems including chest pain, coughing, throat irritation, and congestion
The vertical layers of Weather Research and Forecast (WRF) contain 35 sigma levels with 15 layers within the planetary boundary layer (PBL), in which the lowest sigma level is at a height of 12 meters
It is necessary to evaluate meteorological simulation before studying air quality prediction. The meteorological variables such as temperature, wind, pressure and humidity play an important role in ozone initiation, development and depletion
Summary
Breathing ozone can trigger a variety of health problems including chest pain, coughing, throat irritation, and congestion. It can worsen bronchitis, emphysema, and asthma. Human exposure to high concentration of ground level ozone continues to bother many areas in the US in spite of the implementation of government-mandated emissions control strategies [29]. This is because the control of ground level ozone is more difficult than for many other primary pollutants because ozone is a secondary pollutant. Regional air quality models such as the US EPA's
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