Evaluation of Secondary Organic Aerosol (SOA) simulations for Seoul, Korea

However, scientific understanding of the atmospheric formation and removal processes of OA, especially for secondary organic aerosols (SOA), is still highly uncertain. In this study, we examine the characteristics of SOA formation in Seoul during spring-summer 2016 and fall-winter 2017/2018, using airborne and ground observations along with a 3-D global chemical transport model, GEOS-Chem.

We use four different SOA schemes in the model, including simplified and complex volatility-based frameworks, and evaluate them by comparing the simulations with the observations to examine how our scientific understanding embedded in each SOA scheme affects the observed biases. Our analysis of the model performance of each scheme also provides the most suitable approach in simulating SOA in a typical urban environment.