Effect of different emission inventories on modeled ozone and carbon monoxide in Southeast Asia

Biomass-burning emissions are from the Fire Inventory from the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) (FINNv1) model. WRF-Chem reasonably predicts the 2 m temperature, 10 m wind, and precipitation. In general, surface CO is underpredicted by WRF-Chem while surface O₃ is overpredicted.

The NO₂ tropospheric column predicted by WRF-Chem has the same magnitude as observations, but tends to underpredict the NO₂ column over the equatorial ocean and near Indonesia. Simulations using different anthropogenic emissions produce only a slight variability of O₃ and CO mixing ratios, while biomass-burning emissions add more variability. The different anthropogenic emissions differ by up to 30% in CO emissions, but O₃ and CO mixing ratios averaged over the land areas of the model domain differ by ~4.5% and ~8%, respectively, among the simulations.

Biomass-burning emissions create a substantial increase for both O₃ and CO by ~29% and ~16%, respectively, when comparing the March biomass-burning period to the December period with low biomass-burning emissions. The simulations show that none of the anthropogenic emission inventories are better than the others for predicting O₃ surface mixing ratios. However, the simulations with different anthropogenic emission inventories do differ in their predictions of CO surface mixing ratios producing variations of ~30% for March and 10–20% for December at Thai surface monitoring sites.