Effect of ambient temperature on species lumping for total organic gases in gasoline exhaust emissions

Volatile organic compound (VOCs) emissions from sources often need to be compressed or “lumped” into species classes for use in emissions inventories intended for air quality modeling. This needs to be done to ensure computational efficiency. The lumped profiles are usually reported for one value of ambient temperature. However, temperature-specific detailed profiles have been constructed in the recent past - the current study investigates how the lumping of species from those profiles into different atmospheric chemistry mechanisms is affected by temperature, considering three temperatures (−18 °C, −7 °C and 24 °C). The mechanisms considered differed on the assumptions used for lumping: CB05 (carbon bond type), SAPRC (ozone formation potential) and RACM2 (molecular surrogate and reactivity weighting). In this space, four sub-mechanisms for SAPRC were considered. Scaling factors were developed for each lumped model species and mechanism in terms of moles of lumped species per unit mass. Species which showed a direct one-to-one mapping (SAPRC/RACM2) reported scaling factors that were unchanged across mechanisms. However, CB05 showed different trends since one compound often is mapped onto multiple model species, out of which the paraffinic double bond (PAR) is predominant. Temperature-dependent parameterizations for emission factors pertaining to each lumped species class and mechanism were developed as part of the study. Here, the same kind of model species showed varying lumping parameters across the different mechanisms. These differences could be attributed to differing approaches in lumping. The scaling factors and temperature-dependent parameterizations could be used to update emissions inventories such as MOVES or SMOKE for use in chemical transport modeling.