Source apportionment of secondary organic aerosol in China using a regional source-oriented chemical transport model and two emission inventories

Highlights: • Significant regional transport of SOA from southeast Asia is predicted in spring. • Industrial + residential/biogenic sources are the largest contributor in winter/summer. • Using REAS2 leads to much higher transportation sector contributions. • Difference in total VOC emission and speciation needs to be further studied. A Community Multiscale Air Quality (CMAQ) model with source-oriented lumped SAPRC-11 (S11L) photochemical mechanism and secondary organic aerosol (SOA) module was applied to determine the contributions of anthropogenic and biogenic sources to SOA concentrations in China. A one-year simulation of 2013 using the Multi-resolution Emission Inventory for China (MEIC) shows that summer SOA are generally higher (10–15 μg m⁻³) due to large contributions of biogenic (country average 60%) and industrial sources (17%). In winter, SOA formation was mostly due to anthropogenic emissions from industries (40%) and residential sources (38%). Emissions from other countries in southeast China account for approximately 14% of the SOA in both summer and winter, and 46% in spring due to elevated open biomass burning in southeast Asia. The Regional Emission inventory in ASia v2.1 (REAS2) was applied in this study for January and August 2013. Two sets of simulations with the REAS2 inventory were conducted using two different methods to speciate total non-methane carbon into model species. One approach uses total non-methane hydrocarbon (NMHC) emissions and representative speciation profiles from the SPECIATE database. The other approach retains the REAS2 speciated species that can be directly mapped to S11L model species and uses source specific splitting factors to map other REAS2 lumped NMHC species. Biogenic emissions are still the most significant contributor in summer based on these two sets of simulations. However, contributions from the transportation sector to SOA in January are predicted to be much more important based on the two REAS2 emission inventories (∼30–40% vs. ∼5% by MEIC), and contributions from residential sources according to REAS2 was much lower (∼21–24% vs. ∼42%). These discrepancies in source contributions to SOA need to be further investigated as the country seeks for optimal emission control strategies to fight severe air pollution.