General Comment: This paper describes the effect of wildfire particulate matter on air quality over a large part of Europe in 2003. It uses MODIS daily smoke emission inventory and a simple parameterization of injection altitude to prescribe the wildfire emissions in a meso-scale chemistry transport model. The authors conclude that the wildfire resulted in a significant enhancement of PM10 grou...

Secondary inorganic aerosols (SIA) are the predominant components of fine particulate matter (PM2.5) and have significant impacts on air quality, human health, and climate change. In this study, the Community Multiscale Air Quality modeling system (CMAQ) was modified to incorporate SO2 heterogeneous reactions on the surface of dust particles. The revised model was then used to simulate the spat...

This paper is Part II in a pair of papers that examines the results of the Community Multiscale Air Quality (CMAQ) model version 4.5 (v4.5) and discusses the potential explanations for the model performance characteristics seen. The focus of this paper is on fine particulate matter (PM2.5) and its chemical composition. Improvements made to the dry deposition velocity and cloud treatment in CMAQ...

Receptor models are used to identify and quantify source contributions to particulate matter and volatile organic compounds based on measurements of many chemical components at receptor sites. These components are selected based on their consistent appearance in some source types and their absence in others. UNMIX, positive matrix factorization (PMF), and effective variance are different soluti...

Size-resolved composition of particulate matter (PM) sampled in the industrial town of Port Talbot (PT), UK was determined in comparison to a typical urban background site in Birmingham (EROS). A Micro-Orifice Uniform Deposit Impactor (MOUDI) sampler was deployed for two separate sampling campaigns with the addition of a Grimm optical spectrometer at the PT site. MOUDI samples were analysed for...

Impact of emissions from ocean-going ships on ozone and particulate matter concentrations is quantified using UCICIT model for the South Coast Air Basin of California (SoCAB). The modeling domain encompasses Los Angeles and Long Beach ports and part of the Pacific Ocean that is traversed by ships to visit these ports. Impacts are assessed for a base year (2002) and a future year (2020) by analy...

Environmental health policy decisions are characterized by irreversibility and uncertainty of an economic, ecological and biomedical nature. For this reason decision-makers may choose to exercise when possible some discretion over the timing and scope of policy. Problems of this kind fall within the framework of the theory of irreversible investments as applied to the sunk costs and sunk bene t...

This paper presents global scenarios of sulphur dioxide (SO(2)), nitrogen oxides (NO(x)), and particulate matter (PM) emissions from road transport through to 2050, taking into account the potential impacts of: (1) the timing of air pollutant emission regulation implementation in developing countries; (2) global CO(2) mitigation policy implementation; and (3) vehicle cost assumptions, on study ...

[1] To improve estimates of remote contributions of dust to fine particulate matter (PM2.5) in the western United States, new dust particle size distributions (PSDs) based upon scale-invariant fragmentation theory (Kok_PSD) with constraints from in situ measurements (IMP_PSD) are implemented in a chemical transport model (GEOS-Chem). Compared to initial simulations, this leads to reductions in ...

Traffic related sources are a significant contributor of particulate matter, particularly in urban environments and major cities. Traffic related particles can be distinguished into: exhaust traffic related particles, which are emitted as a result of incomplete fuel combustion and lubricant volatilization during the combustion procedure, and nonexhaust traffic related particles, which are eithe...