Influence of biomass burning vapor wall loss correction on modeling organic aerosols in Europe by CAMx v6.50

Jiang, Jianhui; El Haddad, Imad; Aksoyoglu, Sebnem; Stefenelli, Giulia; Bertrand, Amelie; Marchand, Nicolas; Canonaco, Francesco; Petit, Jean-Eudes; Favez, Olivier; Gilardoni, Stefania; Baltensperger, Urs; Prévôt, André S. H.

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-14-1681-2021

Articles | Volume 14, issue 3

https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-14-1681-2021

© Author(s) 2021. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-14-1681-2021

© Author(s) 2021. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Articles | Volume 14, issue 3

Development and technical paper

|

24 Mar 2021

Development and technical paper |

| 24 Mar 2021

Influence of biomass burning vapor wall loss correction on modeling organic aerosols in Europe by CAMx v6.50

Jianhui Jiang, Imad El Haddad, Sebnem Aksoyoglu, Giulia Stefenelli, Amelie Bertrand, Nicolas Marchand, Francesco Canonaco, Jean-Eudes Petit, Olivier Favez, Stefania Gilardoni, Urs Baltensperger, and André S. H. Prévôt

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Final revised paper (published on 24 Mar 2021)
Supplement to the final revised paper
Preprint (discussion started on 04 Sep 2020)
Supplement to the preprint

Interactive discussion

Status: closed

AC: Author comment | RC: Referee comment | SC: Short comment | EC: Editor comment

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RC1: 'Review for Jiang et al.', Anonymous Referee #1, 04 Nov 2020
- AC1: 'Responses to RC1', Jianhui Jiang, 15 Dec 2020
RC2: 'Review of Jiang et al.', Anonymous Referee #2, 17 Nov 2020
- AC2: 'Responses to RC2', Jianhui Jiang, 15 Dec 2020

Peer-review completion

AR: Author's response | RR: Referee report | ED: Editor decision

AR by Jianhui Jiang on behalf of the Authors (15 Dec 2020) Author's response Manuscript

ED: Referee Nomination & Report Request started (22 Dec 2020) by Christoph Knote

RR by Anonymous Referee #1 (28 Jan 2021)

Suggestions for revision or reasons for rejection

The authors seem to have responded to both sets of comments and questions posed by the two reviewers. I have specific concerns on a few of the responses (see below) but should note that most of my concerns are centered around the description of the methods (and not the results). I am generally okay with the response and changes made to the manuscript and recommend publication of this paper in GMD after the authors have had a chance to review my additional concerns below.

Continuing comments:

1 Reviewer 1, point 1:
a. Thanks for providing additional details on the PTR data but I still think the paper would benefit from a brief description of the PTR measurements, speciation information, and how those species were aggregated for use in the model, including the rationale (e.g., reduced-form?) and limitations (e.g., highly lumped?) of this approach. This detail is limiting comprehension of the modeling sections in 2.2 and 2.3 and could be done in the SI if there are issues with space.
b. Can you show how the measurements were used to calculate the OH reaction rate constant? Is there a citation for this calculation?

2. Reviewer 1, point 2: I still maintain that determining SVOC and IVOC emissions from POA emissions (that are susceptible to vagaries of partitioning) is a poor choice. It should be fine for this work but needs to be discussed in light of arguments made in earlier work, e.g., Lu et al. (2018; https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-18-17637-2018).

3. Why is the sum of the molar yields in Table 1 for IVOCs larger than 1?

4. Reviewer 1, point 2: If I understand this correctly, the model assumes that there is only a single IVOC-like precursor that reacts with OH to form biomass burning SOA and that all other precursors (e.g., single-ring aromatics) are ignored. When the IVOC emissions are determined and adjusted to remove other more traditional SOA precursors in CAMx, a few assumptions are being made but none are explained. It assumes that benzene, toluene, and xylenes are the only other traditional SOA precursors. What about larger aromatics, isoprene, monoterpenes, and the likes? It assumes that the yields of the now-removed traditional SOA precursors are identical to the IVOC-like SOA precursor that is being added. On a related note, why weren’t the traditional precursors explicitly accounted for in the box model so parameters specific to the IVOC-like SOA precursor could be directly determined and applied in CAMx?

5. Reviewer 1, point 8: Sinha et al. (2018) heated the aerosol and heating itself could change the mass accommodation coefficient through changes in the viscosity/bulk diffusion coefficient. So, I don’t see that study as directly refuting the findings from Cappa and Akherati that used isothermal dilution to probe changes in POA.

6. Reviewer 1, point 9: The different k_w seem to scale inversely with chamber size. This fact could be mentioned.

7. Reviewer 1, point 11: See Figure 4 and Figure S10 in Krechmer et al. (2016).

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ED: Publish subject to minor revisions (review by editor) (29 Jan 2021) by Christoph Knote

AR by Jianhui Jiang on behalf of the Authors (07 Feb 2021) Author's response Author's tracked changes Manuscript

ED: Publish as is (17 Feb 2021) by Christoph Knote

AR by Jianhui Jiang on behalf of the Authors (18 Feb 2021) Manuscript

Short summary

We developed a box model with a volatility basis set to simulate organic aerosol (OA) from biomass burning and optimized the vapor-wall-loss-corrected OA yields with a genetic algorithm. The optimized parameterizations were then implemented in the air quality model CAMx v6.5. Comparisons with ambient measurements indicate that the vapor-wall-loss-corrected parameterization effectively improves the model performance in predicting OA, which reduced the mean fractional bias from −72.9 % to −1.6 %.