Dickerson, He, Salawitch Investigate Impact of Vehicle Emissions on Ambient Temperature and Specific Humidity

Cazzy Medley
January 19, 2021
Highlights

ESSIC/CISESS Professors Russell R. Dickerson and Ross Salawitch as well as ESSIC/CISESS Assistant Research Professor Hao He have a new paper in Atmospheric Environment titled “Using near-road observations of CO, NOy, and CO2 to investigate emissions from vehicles: Evidence for an impact of ambient temperature and specific humidity”. The paper’s co-authors also include Dolly Hall, whose Ph.D. research partly consists of this paper, Xinrong Ren, and Timothy Canty from the University of Maryland’s Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Science. Other co-authors from outside the University of Maryland include Jennifer C. Hains, Daniel C. Anderson, and Cory R. Martin. The work was performed in collaboration with the Maryland Department of the Environment.

For the study, the researchers investigated the impact of vehicle emissions of nitrogen oxides (NOx) and carbon monoxide on ambient temperatures and specific humidity. Previous studies have shown that NOx emissions in the US EPA’s National Emissions Inventory (NEI) are overestimated relative to observations in the summer and possibly for an annual average. This study suggests that this overestimation may be corrected by accounting for the temperature sensitivity of mobile NOx running emissions within the Motor Vehicle Emission Simulator (MOVES). Future work will focus on improving MOVES by adjusting parameters controlling the impact of temperature and humidity on emissions to better represent the behavior of real-world vehicular emissions.

Dickerson’s research focuses on the multidisciplinary areas of atmospheric chemistry, air pollution, climate, and global biogeochemical cycles. . Prof. Dickerson heads the Regional Atmospheric Measurement Modeling and Prediction Program, RAMMPP and is a member of the Maryland Climate Change Commission. He heads the NIST-supported Flux of Atmospheric Greenhouse Gases in Maryland project (FLAGG-MD). Before coming to Maryland, Prof. Dickerson worked at the NCAR and at the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry, in Mainz, Germany.

He is an Assistant Research Professor in the Department of Atmospheric & Oceanic Science (AOSC) and ESSIC. He is an air quality molder in the AOSC Atmospheric Chemistry group and the ESSIC Earth System Modeling (EaSM) group. His research focuses on improving numerical simulations of air quality based on campaign measurements and satellite observations at the regional scale.

Salawitch is a professor in the Department of Atmospheric & Oceanic Science and the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry. He came to UMD and ESSIC in 2007, after having worked at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. His research focuses on quantification of the effects of human activity on atmospheric composition. Major topics of current interest are stratospheric ozone depletion and recovery, air quality, and the global carbon cycle.

To access the article, click here: “Using near-road observations of CO, NOy, and CO2 to investigate emissions from vehicles: Evidence for an impact of ambient temperature and specific humidity”