Abstract
For the purpose of quantifying the impact of urban emission from Central European cities on the present-day regional air-quality, the regional climate model RegCM4.2 was coupled with the chemistry transport model CAMx, including two-way interactions. A series of simulations was carried out for the 2001-2010 period either with all urban emissions included (base case) or without considering urban emissions.
Further, the sensitivity of ozone production to urban emissions was examined by performing reduction experiments with MINUS SIGN 20 % emission perturbation of NOx and/or NMVOC. EC air-quality measures were chosen as metrics describing the cities emission impact on regional air pollution.
Due to urban emissions, significant ozone titration occurs over cities while over rural areas remote from cities, ozone production is modeled, mainly in terms of number of exceedances and accumulated exceedances over the threshold of 40 ppbv. Urban NOx, SO2 and PM2.5 emissions also significantly contribute to concentrations in the cities themselves (up to 50-70 % for NOx and SO2, and up to 60 % for PM2.5), but the contribution is large over rural areas as well (10-20 %).
Although air pollution over cities is largely determined by the local urban emissions, considerable (often a few tens of %) fraction of the concentration is attributable to other sources from rural areas and minor cities. Further, for the case of Prague (Czech Republic capital) it is shown that the inter-urban interference between large cities does not play an important role which means that the impact on a chosen city of emissions from all other large cities is very small.
The emissions perturbation experiments showed that to achieve significant ozone reduction over cities in central Europe, the emission control strategies have to focus on the reduction of NMVOC, as reducing NOx, due to suppressed titration, leads often to increased O3.