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Title: A top-down assessment using OMI NO2 suggests an underestimate in the NOx emissions inventory in Seoul, South Korea, during KORUS-AQ

Journal Article · · Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics (Online)
 [1]; ORCiD logo [2];  [3]; ORCiD logo [4];  [1];  [5];  [5];  [5]; ORCiD logo [6];  [7];  [1]
  1. Argonne National Lab. (ANL), Argonne, IL (United States); Univ. of Chicago, Chicago, IL (United States)
  2. Univ. of California, Los Angeles, CA (United States)
  3. Univ. Space Research Assoc., Columbia, MD (United States); NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD (United States)
  4. Saint Louis Univ., St. Louis, MO (United States)
  5. Konkuk Univ., Seoul (South Korea)
  6. Harvard Univ., Cambridge, MA (United States)
  7. Univ. of Iowa, Iowa City, IA (United States)

Abstract. In this work, we investigate the NOx emissions inventory inSeoul, South Korea, using a regional ozone monitoring instrument (OMI)NO2 product derived from the standard NASA product. We first develop a regional OMI NO2 product by recalculating the air mass factors using a high-resolution (4 km × 4 km) WRF-Chem model simulation, which better captures the NO2 profile shapes in urban regions. We then apply a model-derived spatial averaging kernel to further downscale the retrieval and account for the subpixel variability. These two modifications yield OMI NO2 values in the regional product that are1.37 times larger in the Seoul metropolitan region and >2 times larger near substantial point sources. These two modifications also yield an OMINO2 product that is in better agreement with the PandoraNO2 spectrometer measurements acquired during the South Korea–United States Air Quality (KORUS-AQ) field campaign.NOx emissions are then derived for the Seoul metropolitan area during the KORUS-AQ field campaign using a top-down approach with the standard and regional NASA OMI NO2 products. We first apply the top-down approach to a model simulation to ensure that the method is appropriate: the WRF-Chem simulation utilizing the bottom-up emissions inventory yields a NOx emissions rate of 227±94 kt yr–1, while the bottom-up inventory itself within a 40 km radius of Seoul yields a NOx emissions rate of198 kt yr–1. Using the top-down approach on the regional OMINO2 product, we derive the NOx emissions rate from Seoul to be 484±201 kt yr–1, and a 353±146 kt yr–1NOx emissions rate using the standard NASA OMI NO2product. This suggests an underestimate of 53 % and 36 % in the bottom-up inventory using the regional and standard NASA OMI NO2products respectively. To supplement this finding, we compare theNO2 and NOy simulated by WRF-Chem to observations of the same quantity acquired by aircraft and find a model underestimate.When NOx emissions in the WRF-Chem model are increased by a factor of 2.13 in the Seoul metropolitan area, there is better agreement with KORUS-AQ aircraft observations and the recalculated OMI NO2tropospheric columns. Finally, we show that by using a WRF-Chem simulation with an updated emissions inventory to recalculate the air mass factor (AMF),there are small differences (~8 %) in OMI NO2 compared tousing the original WRF-Chem simulation to derive the AMF. This suggests that changes in model resolution have a larger effect on the AMF calculation than modifications to the South Korean emissions inventory. Furthermore the current work is focused on South Korea using OMI, the methodology developed in this work can be applied to other world regions using TROPOMI and future satellite datasets (e.g., GEMS and TEMPO) to produce high-quality region-specific top-down NOx emissions estimates.

Research Organization:
Argonne National Laboratory (ANL), Argonne, IL (United States)
Sponsoring Organization:
National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)
Grant/Contract Number:
AC02-06CH11357
OSTI ID:
1496825
Journal Information:
Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics (Online), Vol. 19, Issue 3; ISSN 1680-7324
Publisher:
European Geosciences UnionCopyright Statement
Country of Publication:
United States
Language:
English
Citation Metrics:
Cited by: 52 works
Citation information provided by
Web of Science

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Cited By (7)

Comparison of Near‐Surface NO 2 Pollution With Pandora Total Column NO 2 During the Korea‐United States Ocean Color (KORUS OC) Campaign journal December 2019
Fine-Scale Columnar and Surface NOx Concentrations over South Korea: Comparison of Surface Monitors, TROPOMI, CMAQ and CAPSS Inventory journal January 2020
Detection of Strong NOX Emissions from Fine-scale Reconstruction of the OMI Tropospheric NO2 Product journal August 2019
A methodology to constrain carbon dioxide emissions from coal-fired power plants using satellite observations of co-emitted nitrogen dioxide journal January 2020
Underestimation of column NO2 amounts from the OMI satellite compared to diurnally varying ground-based retrievals from multiple PANDORA spectrometer instruments journal January 2019
Assessment of NO2 observations during DISCOVER-AQ and KORUS-AQ field campaigns journal January 2020
Diurnal variation of aerosol optical depth and PM2.5 in South Korea: a synthesis from AERONET, satellite (GOCI), KORUS-AQ observation, and the WRF-Chem model journal January 2018

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