Development of an automated photolysis rates prediction system based on machine learning

Based on observed meteorological elements, photolysis rates (J-values) and pollutant concentrations, an automated J-values predicting system by machine learning (J-ML) has been developed to reproduce and predict the J-values of O¹D, NO₂, HONO, H₂O₂, HCHO, and NO₃, which are the crucial values for the prediction of the atmospheric oxidation capacity (AOC) and secondary pollutant concentrations such as ozone (O₃), secondary organic aerosols (SOA). The J-ML can self-select the optimal “Model + Hyperparameters” without human interference. The evaluated results showed that the J-ML had a good performance to reproduce the J-values where most of the correlation (R) coefficients exceed 0.93 and the accuracy (P) values are in the range of 0.68-0.83, comparing with the J-values from observations and from the tropospheric ultraviolet and visible (TUV) radiation model in Beijing, Chengdu, Guangzhou and Shanghai. The hourly prediction was also well performed with R from 0.78 to 0.81 for next 3-days and from 0.69 to 0.71 for next 7-days, respectively. Compared with O₃ concentrations by using J-values from the TUV model, an emission-driven observation-based model (e-OBM) by using the J-values from the J-ML showed a 4%-12% increase in R and 4%-30% decrease in ME, indicating that the J-ML could be used as an excellent supplement to traditional numerical models. The feature importance analysis concluded that the key influential parameter was the surface solar downwards radiation for all J-values, and the other dominant factors for all J-values were 2-m mean temperature, O₃, total cloud cover, boundary layer height, relative humidity and surface pressure.