Quantitative Assessment of Parametric Uncertainty in Northern Hemisphere PAH Concentrations
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Author(s)
Pike-Thackray, Colin
Friedman, Carey
Zhang, Yanxu
Selin, Noelle E
Date Issued
June 2015
Journal
Environmental Science & Technology
Publisher
American Chemical Society (ACS)
Citation
Thackray, Colin P., Carey L. Friedman, Yanxu Zhang, and Noelle E. Selin. “Quantitative Assessment of Parametric Uncertainty in Northern Hemisphere PAH Concentrations.” Environ. Sci. Technol. 49, no. 15 (August 4, 2015): 9185–9193.
Version
Author's final manuscript
Abstract
We quantitatively examine the relative importance of uncertainty in emissions and physicochemical properties (including reaction rate constants) to Northern Hemisphere (NH) and Arctic polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon (PAH) concentrations, using a computationally efficient numerical uncertainty technique applied to the global-scale chemical transport model GEOS-Chem. Using polynomial chaos (PC) methods, we propagate uncertainties in physicochemical properties and emissions for the PAHs benzo[a]pyrene, pyrene and phenanthrene to simulated spatially resolved concentration uncertainties. We find that the leading contributors to parametric uncertainty in simulated concentrations are the black carbon-air partition coefficient and oxidation rate constant for benzo[a]pyrene, and the oxidation rate constants for phenanthrene and pyrene. NH geometric average concentrations are more sensitive to uncertainty in the atmospheric lifetime than to emissions rate. We use the PC expansions and measurement data to constrain parameter uncertainty distributions to observations. This narrows a priori parameter uncertainty distributions for phenanthrene and pyrene, and leads to higher values for OH oxidation rate constants and lower values for European PHE emission rates.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Institute for Data, Systems, and Society
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Center for Global Change Science
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences
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Article is made available in accordance with the publisher's policy and may be subject to US copyright law. Please refer to the publisher's site for terms of use.
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DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1021/acs.est.5b01823
