Sheng-Po Chen

Diagnostic Modeling of PAMS VOC Observation

Although a number of gas-phase chemical mechanisms, such as CBM-IV, RADM2, and SAPRC have been successful in studying gas-phase atmospheric chemical processes, they all used different combinations of lumped organic species to describe the role of organics in gas-phase chemical processes. Photochemical Assessment Monitoring Stations (PAMS) have been in use for over a decade and yet it is not clear how the detailed organic species measured by PAMS compare to the lumped modeled species. By developing a detailed mechanism specifically for the PAMS organics and embedding this diagnostic model within a regional-scale transport and chemistry model, one can then directly compare PAMS observation with regional-scale model simulations. By means of this comparison one can perhaps better evaluate model performance. The Taiwan Air Quality Model (TAQM) was modified by adding a submodel with transport processes and chemical mechanism for interactions of the 56 species observed by PAMS. It is assumed that TAQM can simulate the overall regional-scale environment including time evolution of oxidants and radicals; these results are then used to simulate the evolution of PAMS organics with species-specific source functions, meteorological transport, and chemical interactions. Model simulations of each PAMS organic were compared with PAMS hourly surface measurements. A case study with data collected at three sites in central Taiwan showed that when meteorological simulations were comparable with observations, diurnal patterns of most organics performed well with PAMS data after emissions were corrected. It is found emissions of over half of the PAMS species require correction, some by surprisingly large factors. With such correlation, simulated time evolution of ratios of ethylbenzene/m,p-xylenes and ethane/n-butane showed similar behaviors as shown by observation data. From the results of PAMS organics diurnal variations as well as indicator ratios, one can conclude that PAMS Air Quality Model (PAMS-AQM) has been successfully developed and can be applied to the study of evolution of PAMS organics in regional and urban environments. Further, one finds that an existing VOC emissions estimation procedure heavily dependent on U.S.-data based emissions speciation factors is suspect in application in Taiwan and perhaps in other countries as well. A protocol, using PAMS-AQM for testing consistency between detailed VOC emissions and PAMS observations, has been developed and demonstrated.

Air quality impacted by local pollution sources and beyond – Using a prominent petro-industrial complex as a study case

The present study combines high-resolution measurements at various distances from a world-class gigantic petrochemical complex with model simulations to test a method to assess industrial emissions and their effect on local air quality. Due to the complexity in wind conditions which were highly seasonal, the dominant wind flow patterns in the coastal region of interest were classified into three types, namely northeast monsoonal (NEM) flows, southwest monsoonal (SEM) flows and local circulation (LC) based on six years of monitoring data. Sulfur dioxide (SO2) was chosen as an indicative pollutant for prominent industrial emissions. A high-density monitoring network of 12 air-quality stations distributed within a 20-km radius surrounding the petrochemical complex provided hourly measurements of SO2 and wind parameters. The SO2 emissions from major industrial sources registered by the monitoring network were then used to validate model simulations and to illustrate the transport of the SO2 plumes under the three typical wind patterns. It was found that the coupling of observations and modeling was able to successfully explain the transport of the industrial plumes. Although the petrochemical complex was seemingly the only major source to affect local air quality, multiple prominent sources from afar also played a significant role in local air quality. As a result, we found that a more complete and balanced assessment of the local air quality can be achieved only after taking into account the wind characteristics and emission factors of a much larger spatial scale than the initial (20 km by 20 km) study domain.