WRF-Chem simulation of East Asian air quality: Sensitivity to temporal and vertical emissions distributions

This study develops fine temporal (seasonal, day-of-week, diurnal) and vertical allocations of anthropogenic emissions for the TRACE-P inventory and evaluates their impacts on the East Asian air quality prediction using WRF-Chem simulations in July 2001 at 30-km grid spacing against available surface measurements from EANET and NEMCC. For NO2 and SO2, the diurnal and vertical redistributions of emissions play essential roles, while the day-of-week variation is less important. When all incorporated, WRF-Chem best simulates observations of surface NO2 and SO2 concentrations, while using the default emissions produces the worst result. The sensitivity is especially large over major cities and industrial areas, where surface NO2 and SO2 concentrations are reduced by respectively 3–7 and 6–12 ppbv when using the scaled emissions. The incorporation of all the three redistributions of emissions simulates surface O3 concentrations higher by 4–8 ppbv at night and 2–4 ppbv in daytime over broad areas of northern, eastern and central China. To this sensitivity, the diurnal redistribution contributes more than the other two.