Emission inventory development and processing for the Seasonal Model for Regional Air Quality (SMRAQ) project

This paper describes the experiences and insights gained from inventory preparation and emissions processing for the Seasonal Model for Regional Air Quality (SMRAQ) project. The emission inventory was derived from the 1990 and 1995 Ozone Transport Assessment Group (OTAG) inventories. The authors outline the emissions processing strategy used for the May-to-September simulation, summarize the inventory characteristics and corrections made on the OTAG inventories, and describe the quality assurance steps taken as part of the processing. They then provide spatial maps and daily total time series charts of the hourly, gridded emissions of nitrogen oxides (NOx), reactive organic gases (ROG), and carbon monoxide (CO). Large peaks from electric utility point sources and urban mobile sources characterize the NOx emissions, and the NOx emissions in nonpeak regions are primarily mobile-source emissions. ROG emissions are dominated by biogenic isoprene production in the southern United States, and they have a strong seasonal variability. CO emissions are characterized by less variability, with area and mobile sources dominating the inventory. the authors compare ratios of season-average nonmethane organic gases to NOx between the emission inventory and the Photochemical Assessment Monitoring Stations (PAMS) data, and these comparisons show poor correlation between the inventory and ambient ratios

Duke Scholars

Author Prasad S. Kasibhatla Environmental Sciences and Policy