Temporal allocation of ozone precursor emissions within a modeling domain in Middle Tennessee

In order to comply with the Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990, the State of Tennessee's Air Pollution Control Division has contracted with the University of Tennessee to utilize the Urban Airshed Model (UAM) in an effort to determine emission reductions needed in the Nashville area to achieve attainment of the National Ambient Air Quality Standards (NAAQS) for ozone by 1996. Among the many input parameters required by the model are hourly emission profiles of ozone precursor pollutants from all sources. The model uses these profiles to predict hourly ozone concentrations.

The objective of this thesis is to describe the development of temporal emission profiles for the middle Tennessee study area, that distribute a typical ozone season day's emissions to different days of the week and different hours of the day for 1988; this was the period during which the Nashville area exceeded the NAAQS for ozone.

Default national temporal profiles provided by the EPA for use in the absence of state specific data were investigated in detail for each source category and have been used for modeling emissions in Tennessee in some cases. Composite hourly emission profiles for each source type for each pollutant are presented in the concluding chapter. Composite weekly emission profiles for the entire modeling domain are also discussed.