A two-way coupled regional urban–street network air quality model system for Beijing, China

Abstract. Owing to the substantial traffic emissions in urban areas, especially near road areas, the concentrations of pollutants, such as ozone (O3) and its precursors, have a large difference compared to regional averages, and their distributions cannot be captured accurately by traditional single-scale air quality models. In this study, a new version of a regional urban–street network model (an Integrated Air Quality Modeling System coupling regional urban–street: IAQMS-street v2.0) is presented. An upscaling module is implemented in IAQMS-street v2.0 to calculate the impact of mass transfer to regional scale from street network. The influence of pollutants in the street network is considered in the concentration calculation on the regional scale, which is not considered in a previous version (IAQMS-street v1.0). In this study, the simulated results in Beijing during August 2021, using IAQMS-street v2.0, IAQMS-street v1.0, and the regional model (Nested Air Quality Prediction Modeling System, NAQPMS), are compared. On-road traffic emissions in Beijing, as the key model input data, were established using intelligent image-recognition technology and real-time traffic big data from navigation applications. The simulated results showed that the O3 and nitrogen oxide (NOx) concentrations in Beijing were reproduced by using IAQMS-street v2.0 on both the regional scale and street scale. The prediction fractions within a factor of 2 (FAC2s) between simulations and observations of NO and NO2 increased from 0.11 and 0.34 in NAQPMS to 0.78 and 1.00 in IAQMS-street v2.0, respectively. The normalized mean biases (NMBs) of NO and NO2 decreased from 2.67 and 1.33 to −0.25 and 0.08. In the coupled model, the concentration of NOx at the street scale is higher than that at the regional scale, and the simulated distribution of pollutants on a regional scale was improved in IAQMS-street v2.0 when compared with that in IAQMS-street v1.0. We further used IAQMS-street v2.0 to quantify the contribution of local on-road traffic emissions to the O3 and NOx emissions and analyze the effect of traffic regulation policies in Beijing. Results showed that heavy-duty trucks are the major source of on-road traffic emissions of NOx. The relative contributions of local traffic emissions to NO2, NO, and O3 concentrations were 53.41 %, 57.45 %, and 8.49 %, respectively. We found that traffic regulation policies in Beijing largely decreased the concentrations of NOx and hydrocarbons (HC); however, the O3 concentration near the road increased due to the decrease consumption of O3 by NO. To decrease the O3 concentration in urban areas, controlling the local emissions of HC and NOx from other sources requires consideration.