Identification

Title

Implications of sea breezes on air quality monitoring in a coastal urban environment: Evidence from high resolution modeling of NO 2 and O 3

Abstract

Coastal urban environments face unique challenges associated with air quality-meteorology interactions. In this study, high resolution chemical transport modeling over the Greater Boston area was performed to improve our understanding of sea breezes impacts on the spatiotemporal variability of primary and secondary pollutants. We perform WRF-Chem simulations at 3 km resolution over June 22 to 10 July 2019 (a period that included 10 sea breeze occurrences), and use Pandora tropospheric NO2 column, surface air quality monitoring, and vertical meteorological aircraft profiles for evaluation. The model generally reproduces observed spatiotemporal variability of air pollution during sea breezes well. Tropospheric columns of NO2 predicted by the model and observed by the Pandora instrument show that sea breezes are associated with rapid increases and steep gradients in tropospheric NO2 and confirm accumulation of local primary emissions. Spatial heterogeneity in tropospheric NO2 is strongly governed by inland penetration lengths of the sea breeze front. Process diagnostics show that three sea-breeze days where O3 observations recorded hourly concentrations >70 ppb have both efficient net chemical O3 production in the boundary layer (>10 ppb/hr) and rapid O3 convergence in the near-surface convergence zone (>20 ppb/hr). During sea breezes, interactions between photochemistry, the convergence zone inland penetration, and urban NOx titration effects, contribute to strong heterogeneity and high O3 inland that is not captured by the current monitoring network. We discuss monitoring needs and model applications for the sea breeze scenarios, with broad implications for air quality monitoring in coastal urban environments.

Resource type

document

Resource locator

Unique resource identifier

code

https://n2t.org/ark:/85065/d7q52tv8

codeSpace

Dataset language

eng

Spatial reference system

code identifying the spatial reference system

Classification of spatial data and services

Topic category

geoscientificInformation

Keywords

Keyword set

keyword value

Text

originating controlled vocabulary

title

Resource Type

reference date

date type

publication

effective date

2016-01-01T00:00:00Z

Geographic location

West bounding longitude

East bounding longitude

North bounding latitude

South bounding latitude

Temporal reference

Temporal extent

Begin position

End position

Dataset reference date

date type

publication

effective date

2023-06-16T00:00:00Z

Frequency of update

Quality and validity

Lineage

Conformity

Data format

name of format

version of format

Constraints related to access and use

Constraint set

Use constraints

Limitations on public access

None

Responsible organisations

Responsible party

contact position

OpenSky Support

organisation name

UCAR/NCAR - Library

full postal address

PO Box 3000

Boulder

80307-3000

email address

opensky@ucar.edu

web address

http://opensky.ucar.edu/

name: homepage

responsible party role

pointOfContact

Metadata on metadata

Metadata point of contact