AAAR 34th Annual Conference
October 12 - October 16, 2015
Hyatt Regency
Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA
Abstract View
Evaluation of Ozone and PM2.5 Model Performance from the Incorporation of Temporally and Spatially Resolved Real-Time Traffic Profiles
SCOTT A. EPSTEIN, Xinqiu Zhang, Kalam Cheung, Sang-Mi Lee, Joe Cassmassi, South Coast Air Quality Management District
Abstract Number: 115 Working Group: Urban Aerosols
Abstract The South Coast Air Basin of California is an area of 10,743 square miles with nearly 17 million residents. Topographical barriers to pollutant transport outside of the Basin along with intense photochemistry, emissions from a strong industrial presence, and a transportation infrastructure reliant on fuel combustion lead to significant pollution problems. Portions of the Basin do not attain federal 8-hr ozone and PM$_(2.5) standards. For informed science-based policy-making, we employ the Community Multiscale Air Quality Modeling System, the Weather-Research-Forecast, and an emission processing model to simulate air quality in Southern California. In the 2012 emissions inventory, on-road vehicles were responsible for 35% of the total VOC emissions and 60% of the total NOx emissions within the basin. Currently, these emissions are processed with a county-wide time-of-day profile that varies with the day-of-week. We have incorporated comprehensive vehicle flow data from a network of 9,000 traffic monitoring stations and 11 truck weight-in-motion monitoring stations maintained by the California Department of Transportation. This extensive data-set captures changes in emission patterns due to day-specific weather conditions, holidays, and special events. Model predictions from the incorporation of spatially-resolved hourly automobile and truck traffic patterns will be evaluated against real-time ozone and PM$_(2.5) composition measurements from a comprehensive network of 38 monitoring stations.