A direct sensitivity approach to predict hourly ozone resulting from compliance with the National Ambient Air Quality Standard.

In setting primary ambient air quality standards, the EPA's responsibility under the law is to establish standards that protect public health. As part of the current review of the ozone National Ambient Air Quality Standard (NAAQS), the US EPA evaluated the health exposure and risks associated with ambient ozone pollution using a statistical approach to adjust recent air quality to simulate just meeting the current standard level, without specifying emission control strategies. One drawback of this purely statistical concentration rollback approach is that it does not take into account spatial and temporal heterogeneity of ozone response to emissions changes. The application of the higher-order decoupled direct method (HDDM) in the community multiscale air quality (CMAQ) model is discussed here to provide an example of a methodology that could incorporate this variability into the risk assessment analyses. Because this approach includes a full representation of the chemical production and physical transport of ozone in the atmosphere, it does not require assumed background concentrations, which have been applied to constrain estimates from past statistical techniques. The CMAQ-HDDM adjustment approach is extended to measured ozone concentrations by determining typical sensitivities at each monitor location and hour of the day based on a linear relationship between first-order sensitivities and hourly ozone values. This approach is demonstrated by modeling ozone responses for monitor locations in Detroit and Charlotte to domain-wide reductions in anthropogenic NOx and VOCs emissions. As seen in previous studies, ozone response calculated using HDDM compared well to brute-force emissions changes up to approximately a 50% reduction in emissions. A new stepwise approach is developed here to apply this method to emissions reductions beyond 50% allowing for the simulation of more stringent reductions in ozone concentrations. Compared to previous rollback methods, this application of modeled sensitivities to ambient ozone concentrations provides a more realistic spatial response of ozone concentrations at monitors inside and outside the urban core and at hours of both high and low ozone concentrations.