Kinetic Modeling of Secondary Organic Aerosol in a Weather-Chemistry Model: Parameterizations, Processes, and Predictions for GOAmazon

Abstract

Secondary organic aerosol (SOA) forms and evolves in the atmosphere through many pathways and processes, over diverse spatial and time scales. Hence, there is a need to represent these widely varying kinetic processes in large-scale atmospheric models to allow for accurate predictions of the abundance, properties, and impacts of SOA. In this work, we integrated a kinetic, process-level model (simpleSOM-MOSAIC) into a weather-chemistry model (WRF-Chem) to simulate the oxidation chemistry and microphysics of atmospheric SOA. simpleSOM-MOSAIC simulates multigenerational gas-phase chemistry, autoxidation reactions, aqueous chemistry, heterogeneous oxidation, oligomerization, and phase-state-influenced gas/particle partitioning of SOA. As a case study, the integrated WRF-Chem-simpleSOM-MOSAIC (WC-SSM) model was used to simulate the photochemical evolution downwind of a large city (Manaus, Brazil) in the Amazon and, in turn, study the anthropogenic and biogenic interactions in an otherwise pristine environment. Consistent with previous work, we found that OA was enhanced by up to a factor of 4 in the urban plume due to elevated hydroxyl radical (OH) concentrations, relative to the background, and that this OA was dominated by SOA from biogenic precursors (80%). In addition to accurately simulating the OA enhancement in the urban plume, the model reproduced the magnitude of the OA oxygen-to-carbon (O:C) ratio and broadly tracked the evolution of the aerosol number size distribution. Our work highlights the importance of including an integrated, kinetic representation of SOA processes in an atmospheric model.

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