Evaluation of on-road vehicle CO and NOx National Emission Inventories using an urban-scale source-oriented air quality model

By grouping the fractional bias (FB) values of the hourly predictions based on vehicle contributions to total CO or NOx concentrations, clear trends in the FB were observed, indicating systematic biases in the emission inventory for these species. Data points dominated by vehicle emissions suggest that surface CO concentrations due to vehicle exhaust are significantly over-estimated by a factor of 2 using either MOVES or MOBILE6.2. NOx concentrations are overestimated by approximately 20-35% and 70% by using the MOBILE6.2 and MOVES emissions, respectively. Emission scaling runs show that a domain-wide reduction of MOBILE6.2 CO emissions by 60% and NOx emissions by 15-25% leads to better model performance of exhaust CO and NOx concentrations in the current study.