A scheme for representing aromatic secondary organic aerosols in chemical transport models: Application to source attribution of organic aerosols over South Korea during the KORUS-AQ campaign

We present a new volatility basis set (VBS) representation of aromatic secondary organic aerosol (SOA) for atmospheric chemistry models by fitting a statistical oxidation model with aerosol microphysics (SOM-TOMAS) to results from laboratory chamber experiments. The resulting SOM-VBS scheme also including previous work on SOA formation from semi- and intermediate volatile organic compounds (S/IVOCs) is implemented in the GEOS-Chem chemical transport model and applied to simulation of observations from the Korea-United States Air Quality Study (KORUS-AQ) field campaign over South Korea in May-June 2016. Our SOM-VBS scheme can simulate the KORUS-AQ organic aerosol (OA) observations from aircraft and surface sites better than the default schemes used in GEOS-Chem including for vertical profiles, diurnal cycle, and partitioning between hydrocarbon-like OA and oxidized OA. Our results confirm the important contributions of oxidized primary OA and aromatic SOA found in previous analyses of the KORUS-AQ data and further show a large contribution from S/IVOCs. Model source attribution of OA in surface air over South Korea indicates one third from domestic anthropogenic emissions, with a large contribution from toluene and xylenes, one third from external anthropogenic emissions, and one third from natural emissions.

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Related Dataset #1 : SOM-VBS Evaluation Data for KORUS-AQ

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Copyright 2023 American Geophysical Union.


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Author Brewer, J. F.
Jacob, D. J.
Jathar, S. H.
He, Y.
Akherati, A.
Zhai, S.
Jo, Duseong
Hodzic, Alma
Nault, B. A.
Campuzano-Jost, P.
Jimenez, J. L.
Park, R. J.
Oak, Y. J.
Liao, H.
Publisher UCAR/NCAR - Library
Publication Date 2023-04-27T00:00:00
Digital Object Identifier (DOI) Not Assigned
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Topic Category geoscientificInformation
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Metadata Date 2025-07-11T15:44:25.999335
Metadata Record Identifier edu.ucar.opensky::articles:26268
Metadata Language eng; USA
Suggested Citation Brewer, J. F., Jacob, D. J., Jathar, S. H., He, Y., Akherati, A., Zhai, S., Jo, Duseong, Hodzic, Alma, Nault, B. A., Campuzano-Jost, P., Jimenez, J. L., Park, R. J., Oak, Y. J., Liao, H.. (2023). A scheme for representing aromatic secondary organic aerosols in chemical transport models: Application to source attribution of organic aerosols over South Korea during the KORUS-AQ campaign. UCAR/NCAR - Library. https://n2t.org/ark:/85065/d7v128sm. Accessed 05 August 2025.

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