Statistical study of the diurnal variation of modeled and measured NMHC contributions

Abstract

The aim of the EVA project is to investigate the precision of modeled emission inventories for a city based on experimental data from two field campaigns in March and October 1998 (Slemr et al., J. Atmos. Chem., 2001). According to the results of the emission inventory model (Kühlwein et al., Atmos. Environ., this issue) for the campaigns, the measured nonmethane hydrocarbons (NMHCs) should originate predominantly from evaporation processes. In this paper these model results are discussed from a meteorological point of view. The results from atmospheric dispersion calculations with a Gaussian plume model are compared with measurements of NMHCs and CO at a site few kilometers downwind of the city of Augsburg. The dispersion model results point out that the correlations of the individual NMHCs against CO lead to different qualities of correlation for NMHCs co-emitted with CO (i.e. from combustion processes) and NMHCs which are not co-emitted with CO (i.e. from evaporation processes). However, using the correlation coefficients r 2, as a measure of the quality of the correlation, the correlations of several NMHCs for which strong evaporation emissions are predicted from the emission inventory model do not show remarkable differences in the r 2 when compared with the correlations for species predominantly emitted from combustion processes. Thus, the NMHC emissions are found to be dominated by emissions from combustion processes and the influence of evaporation processes on anthropogenic NMHC emissions seems to be considerably overestimated by the emission model. This is in agreement with the results of Mannschreck et al. (Atmos. Environ., 2001) which are based on the NMHC composition of the Augsburg city plume.