Quantification of Secondary Sulfate emissions in Europe and Central Asia

The scope of this work is to quantify the emission rate of Secondary Sulfate across a wide region in the Northern hemisphere, mainly in Europe and Western Asia. The data employed are deducted by Positive Matrix Factorization (PMF) on a PM_2.5 chemical composition dataset from 16 European and Asian cities for the period 2014 to 2016. The spatial resolution of the method corresponds to the geographic grid cell size of the Lagrangian particle dispersion model (FLEXPART) which was utilized for the air mass backward simulations. The area covered is also related to the location of the 16 cities under study.

Species with an aerodynamic geometric mean diameter of 400 nm and geometric standard deviation of 1.6 were used to model the Secondary Sulfate aerosol transport. Generalized Tikhonov regularization was applied so as to acquire potential source areas and quantify their emission rate. The results acquired by this process indicate a significant source area for Secondary Sulfate on the East of the Caspian Sea. The maximum emission rate in that area is as high as 10 g m^-2 s^-1. Significant source areas also include South Poland and the Balkans. The results display many similarities to the SO₂ emission map provided by ECLIPSE database.

 

Acknowledgements

This research has been funded by the program “RER/1/015 - Apportioning air pollution sources on a regional scale”, 2016 - 2017.

 

References

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