Volatile chemical product emissions enhance ozone and modulate urban chemistry

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Abstract

Decades of air quality improvements have substantially reduced the motor vehicle emissions of volatile organic compounds (VOCs). Today, volatile chemical products (VCPs) are responsible for half of the petrochemical VOCs emitted in major urban areas. We show that VCP emissions are ubiquitous in US and European cities and scale with population density. We report significant VCP emissions for New York City (NYC), including a monoterpene flux of 14.7 to 24.4 kg ⋅ d ⁻¹ ⋅ km ⁻² from fragranced VCPs and other anthropogenic sources, which is comparable to that of a summertime forest. Photochemical modeling of an extreme heat event, with ozone well in excess of US standards, illustrates the significant impact of VCPs on air quality. In the most populated regions of NYC, ozone was sensitive to anthropogenic VOCs (AVOCs), even in the presence of biogenic sources. Within this VOC-sensitive regime, AVOCs contributed upwards of ∼20 ppb to maximum 8-h average ozone. VCPs accounted for more than 50% of this total AVOC contribution. Emissions from fragranced VCPs, including personal care and cleaning products, account for at least 50% of the ozone attributed to VCPs. We show that model simulations of ozone depend foremost on the magnitude of VCP emissions and that the addition of oxygenated VCP chemistry impacts simulations of key atmospheric oxidation products. NYC is a case study for developed megacities, and the impacts of VCPs on local ozone are likely similar for other major urban regions across North America or Europe.

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Effect of climate change on air quality

Daniel Jacob, Darrell A. Winner (2009)

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Growth, innovation, scaling, and the pace of life in cities.

Luís M A Bettencourt, José Lobo, Dirk Helbing … (2007)

Humanity has just crossed a major landmark in its history with the majority of people now living in cities. Cities have long been known to be society's predominant engine of innovation and wealth creation, yet they are also its main source of crime, pollution, and disease. The inexorable trend toward urbanization worldwide presents an urgent challenge for developing a predictive, quantitative theory of urban organization and sustainable development. Here we present empirical evidence indicating that the processes relating urbanization to economic development and knowledge creation are very general, being shared by all cities belonging to the same urban system and sustained across different nations and times. Many diverse properties of cities from patent production and personal income to electrical cable length are shown to be power law functions of population size with scaling exponents, beta, that fall into distinct universality classes. Quantities reflecting wealth creation and innovation have beta approximately 1.2 >1 (increasing returns), whereas those accounting for infrastructure display beta approximately 0.8 <1 (economies of scale). We predict that the pace of social life in the city increases with population size, in quantitative agreement with data, and we discuss how cities are similar to, and differ from, biological organisms, for which beta<1. Finally, we explore possible consequences of these scaling relations by deriving growth equations, which quantify the dramatic difference between growth fueled by innovation versus that driven by economies of scale. This difference suggests that, as population grows, major innovation cycles must be generated at a continually accelerating rate to sustain growth and avoid stagnation or collapse.