Wintertime Overnight NOx Removal in a Southeastern United States Coal-fired Power Plant Plume: A Model for Understanding Winter NOx Processing and its Implications
atmospheric chemistry
; atmospheric transport
; coal-fired power plant
; mixing
; model
; modeling
; nitric oxide
; nitrous oxide
; ozone
; plume
; pollutant removal
; sensitivity analysis
; volatile organic compound
; winter
; United States
英文摘要:
Nitric oxide (NO) is emitted in large quantities from coal-burning power plants. During the day, the plumes from these sources are efficiently mixed into the boundary layer, while at night, they may remain concentrated due to limited vertical mixing during which they undergo horizontal fanning. At night, the degree to which NO is converted to HNO3 and therefore unable to participate in next-day ozone (O3) formation depends on the mixing rate of the plume, the composition of power plant emissions, and the composition of the background atmosphere. In this study, we use observed plume intercepts from the Wintertime INvestigation of Transport, Emissions and Reactivity campaign to test sensitivity of overnight NOx removal to the N2O5 loss rate constant, plume mixing rate, background O3, and background levels of volatile organic compounds using a 2-D box model of power plant plume transport and chemistry. The factor that exerted the greatest control over NOx removal was the loss rate constant of N2O5. At the lowest observed N2O5 loss rate constant, no other combination of conditions converts more than 10% of the initial NOx to HNO3. The other factors did not influence NOx removal to the same degree. Published 2018. This article has been contributed to by US Government employees and their work is in the public domain in the USA.
Chemical Sciences Division, Earth System Research Laboratory, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Boulder, CO, United States; Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Science, University of Colorado, Boulder, CO, United States; Department of Chemistry, University of Colorado, Boulder, CO, United States; Department of Atmospheric Sciences, University of Washington, Seattle, WA, United States; Department of Physics, North Carolina A&T State University, Greensboro, NC, United States; Department of Chemistry, University of California, Berkeley, CA, United States; Department of Earth and Planetary Science, University of California, Berkeley, CA, United States; Atompheric Chemistry Observations & Modeling Laboratory, National Center for Atmospheric Research, United States; Deparment of Chemistry, University of California, Irvine, CA, United States; NASA Langley Research Center, Hampton, VA, United States; NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD, United States
Recommended Citation:
Fibiger D.L.,McDuffie E.E.,Dubé W.P.,et al. Wintertime Overnight NOx Removal in a Southeastern United States Coal-fired Power Plant Plume: A Model for Understanding Winter NOx Processing and its Implications[J]. Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres,2018-01-01,123(2)