Effects of Chemical Aging on Global Secondary Organic Aerosol using the Volatility Basis Set Approach

Abstract:

Organic aerosol (OA) constitutes significant mass fractions (20-90%) of total dry fine aerosols in the atmosphere. However, global models of OA have shown large discrepancies when compared to the observations because of the limited capability to simulate secondary OA (SOA). For reducing the discrepancies between observations and models, recent studies have shown that chemical aging reactions in the atmosphere are important because they can lead to decreases in organic volatility, resulting in increase of SOA mass yields. To efficiently simulate chemical aging of SOA in the atmosphere, we implemented the volatility basis set approach in a global 3-D chemical transport model (GEOS-Chem). We present full-year simulations and their comparisons with multiple observations - global aerosol mass spectrometer dataset, the Interagency Monitoring of Protected Visual Environments from the United States, the European Monitoring and Evaluation Programme dataset and water-soluble organic carbon observation data collected over East Asia. Using different input parameters in the model, we also explore the uncertainty of the SOA simulation for which we use an observational constraint to find the optimized values with which the model reduces the discrepancy from the observations. Finally, we estimate the effect of OA on climate using our best simulation results.