Simulating secondary organic aerosol in a regional air quality model using the statistical oxidation model – Part 3: Assessing the influence of semi-volatile and intermediate-volatility organic compounds and NO<sub><i>x</i></sub>

Akherati, Ali; Cappa, Christopher D.; Kleeman, Michael J.; Docherty, Kenneth S.; Jimenez, Jose L.; Griffith, Stephen M.; Dusanter, Sebastien; Stevens, Philip S.; Jathar, Shantanu H.

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-19-4561-2019

Articles | Volume 19, issue 7

https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-19-4561-2019

© Author(s) 2019. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-19-4561-2019

© Author(s) 2019. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Articles | Volume 19, issue 7

Research article

|

08 Apr 2019

Research article |

| 08 Apr 2019

Simulating secondary organic aerosol in a regional air quality model using the statistical oxidation model – Part 3: Assessing the influence of semi-volatile and intermediate-volatility organic compounds and NO_x

Ali Akherati, Christopher D. Cappa, Michael J. Kleeman, Kenneth S. Docherty, Jose L. Jimenez, Stephen M. Griffith, Sebastien Dusanter, Philip S. Stevens, and Shantanu H. Jathar

Download

Final revised paper (published on 08 Apr 2019)
Supplement to the final revised paper
Preprint (discussion started on 10 Jul 2018)
Supplement to the preprint

Interactive discussion

Status: closed

AC: Author comment | RC: Referee comment | SC: Short comment | EC: Editor comment

- Printer-friendly version

- Supplement

RC1: 'Review of Akherati', Anonymous Referee #1, 30 Jul 2018
RC2: 'Review of manuscript by "Akherati et al."', Anonymous Referee #2, 09 Aug 2018
RC3: 'Reviewer comments', Anonymous Referee #3, 13 Aug 2018
AC1: 'Response to reviewer comments', Shantanu Jathar, 10 Feb 2019

Peer-review completion

AR: Author's response | RR: Referee report | ED: Editor decision

AR by Shantanu Jathar on behalf of the Authors (10 Feb 2019) Author's response Manuscript

ED: Referee Nomination & Report Request started (11 Feb 2019) by Robert Harley

RR by Anonymous Referee #1 (24 Feb 2019)

Suggestions for revision or reasons for rejection

The revised version of the manuscript is easier to follow than the original submission. The authors have generally done a good job in responding to the reviewer comments. I have a few remaining minor comments.

(1) It is still hard to extract the "big picture" message from the paper, though this is mitigated to some extent by the sheer magnitude of the effort presented in the manuscript. In the response to reviews, the authors note 5 main points from this paper. Ideally it would be more like 2-3.

(2) The entirety of section 4 on model evaluation could be moved to the supporting information. This might make the big picture results stand out more, but keeping this section in the main text should not hamper publication.

(3) I think Figure 5 shows an important result that is maybe not stressed enough. The simulations in this paper push pretty hard on POA partitioning and SOA formation. Even with all of that pushing, the total OA only varies by a factor of ~2 at both high and low NOx. This suggests that while there are uncertainties to work out (e.g., I/SVOC emissions and volatility), OA is constrained reasonably well.

(4) Page 10 describes the IVOC:NMOG ratios applied in the model. The specific ratios used in the model differ from Zhao et al's measurements. My understanding is that this is done to tune SOA mass formation - the IVOC:NMOG ratio needs to be adjusted to account for the use of a single SOA surrogate for each SOM grid. This tuning likely has an impact on model transferability in both space and time. If the combustion IVOC emissions mix is either spatially or temporally variable, the model may be biased when applied outside of the LA-Riverside domain or for predicting future cases.

(5) I still disagree that volatile chemical products are a major source of IVOCs that could produce enough SOA to reach mass closure with measurements. I think this is treated appropriately in the text but is stated too strongly in the abstract.

Hide

ED: Publish subject to minor revisions (review by editor) (24 Feb 2019) by Robert Harley

AR by Shantanu Jathar on behalf of the Authors (26 Feb 2019) Author's response Manuscript

ED: Publish as is (27 Feb 2019) by Robert Harley

AR by Shantanu Jathar on behalf of the Authors (05 Mar 2019)

Download

Article (4646 KB)
Full-text XML

Short summary

Unburned and partially burned organic compounds emitted from fossil fuel and biomass combustion can react in the atmosphere in the presence of sunlight to form particles. In this work, we use an air pollution model to examine the influence of these organic compounds released by motor vehicles and fires on fine particle pollution in southern California.

Simulating secondary organic aerosol in a regional air quality model using the statistical oxidation model – Part 3: Assessing the influence of semi-volatile and intermediate-volatility organic compounds and NOx

Download

Interactive discussion

Peer-review completion

Simulating secondary organic aerosol in a regional air quality model using the statistical oxidation model – Part 3: Assessing the influence of semi-volatile and intermediate-volatility organic compounds and NO_x