Growth in NO<sub>x</sub> emissions from power plants in China: bottom-up estimates and satellite observations

Abstract

Abstract. Using OMI (Ozone Monitoring Instrument) tropospheric NO 2 columns and a nested-grid 3-D global chemical transport model (GEOS-Chem), we investigated the growth in NO x emissions from coal-fired power plants and their contributions to the growth in NO 2 columns in 2005-2007 in China. We first developed a unit-based power plant NO x emission inventory for [2005][2006][2007] to support this investigation. The total capacities of coal-fired power generation have increased by 48.8 % in 2005-2007, with 92.2 % of the total capacity additions coming from generator units with size ≥300 MW. The annual NO x emissions from coal-fired power plants were estimated to be 8.11 Tg NO 2 for 2005 and 9.58 Tg NO 2 for 2007, respectively. The modeled summer average tropospheric NO 2 columns were highly correlated (R 2 = 0.79-0.82) with OMI measurements over grids dominated by power plant emissions, with only 7-14 % low bias, lending support to the high accuracy of the unitbased power plant NO x emission inventory. The ratios of OMI-derived annual and summer average tropospheric NO 2 columns between 2007 and 2005 indicated that most of the grids with significant NO 2 increases were related to power plant construction activities. OMI had the capability to trace the changes of NO x emissions from individual large power plants in cases where there is less interference from other NO x sources. Scenario runs from GEOS-Chem model suggested that the new power plants contributed 18.5 % and 10 % to the annual average NO 2 columns in 2007 in Inner Mongolia and North China, respectively. The massive new power plant NO x emissions significantly changed the local NO 2 profiles, especially in less polluted areas. A sensitivity study found that changes of NO 2 shape factors due to including new power plant emissions increased the summer average OMI tropospheric NO 2 columns by 3.8-17.2 % for six selected locations, indicating that the updated emission information could help to improve the satellite retrievals.

Ship-based MAX-DOAS measurements of tropospheric NO<sub>2</sub>, SO<sub>2</sub>, and HCHO distribution along the Yangtze River

“…The NO x emission over eastern China, including Jiangsu Province (15.41 t/(km 2 yr)) (Shi et al, 2014), is more intensive than other parts of China. In addition, Jiangsu Province is one of the provinces in China with maximum annual NO x emissions from coal-fired power plants (Zhao et al, 2008;Wang et al, 2012a). In contrast, the contribution of vehicle exhaust to NO 2 levels was higher than that of coal-fired power plants in Jiangxi and Hubei provinces, suggesting that traffic emissions have larger impacts on NO 2 levels in these provinces.…”

Tropospheric ozone and its precursors from the urban to the global scale from air quality to short-lived climate forcer

“…Several studies have used satellite NO 2 column observations to constrain nitrogen oxide emission inventories through inverse or forward modelling (Martin et al, 2004;Kim et al, 2009;Lamsal et al, 2011;Wang et al, 2012). These studies exploited the relatively short lifetime of tropospheric nitrogen oxides, which ranges from several hours to a few days.…”

Evaluation of OMI operational standard NO<sub>2</sub> column retrievals using in situ and surface-based NO<sub>2</sub> observations

“…geos-chem.org), to demonstrate the application of scattering weights to re-calculate the OMI tropospheric NO 2 column and to examine the effect of NO 2 profile shape in retrievals of tropospheric NO 2 columns. We employ GEOS-Chem nested simulations Wang et al, 2012;van Donkelaar et al, 2012;Lamsal et al, 2013) with a horizontal grid size of 1 2…”

“…NO 2 observations from satellite offer a globally consistent data set, albeit at coarse resolutions of 10 s to 100 s of kilometers, enabling a wide range of applications including many not feasible from in situ observations. Several studies have used satellite observations of NO 2 to evaluate chemical transport models (Martin et al, 2002;van Noije et al, 2006;Lamsal et al, 2008;Kim et al, 2009;Herron-Thorpe et al, 2010;Huijnen et al, 2010), examine spatial and temporal patterns of NO x emissions (Beirle et al, 2003;Richter et al, 2005;Kim et al, 2006;van der A et al, 2006;Zhang et al, 2007;Boersma et al, 2008a;Lu and Streets, 2012;Wang et al, 2012;Hilboll et al, 2013;Russell et al, 2010Russell et al, , 2012Duncan et al, 2013), examine NO x sources (Jaeglé et al, 2005;van der A et al, 2008;Bucsela et al, 2010;de Wildt et al, 2012;Lin, 2012;Ghude et al, 2010Ghude et al, , 2013aMebust et al, 2011;Mebust and Cohen, 2013), provide top-down constraints on surface NO x emissions Konovalov et al, 2006;Zhao and Wang, 2009;Lin et al, 2010;Lamsal et al, 2011;Ghude et al, 2013b;Vinken et al, 2014), infer NO x lifetimes (Schaub et al, 2007;Lamsal et al, 2010;Beirle et al, 2011), and estimate surface NO 2 concentrations …”