P16     Modeling for KORUS-AQ 2016 – Influence of long-range transport on air quality in the Seoul metropolitan area.

Pfister, Gabriele, Louisa Emmons, National Center for Atmospheric Research, and Christoph Knote, Ludwig-Maximilians-University, Munich

Over the last several decades, East Asia has been a region of dramatic economic growth and increased energy consumption which brings with it increased concerns about bad air quality. The Seoul Capital area which houses roughly half of Korea’s population (~50 million) is one of the areas dealing with worsening air pollution. Part of the problem stems from local emission sources but Seoul is also downwind of mainland China, where some of the most dramatic growth has occurred. Quantifying the contribution of local versus transported pollution to surface ozone and PM2.5 is crucial information for designing robust control strategies. In May-June 2016 an International Cooperative Air Quality Field Study, the KORUS-AQ, took place in Korea and was led in the U.S. by NASA. Using WRF simulations with regional inert tracers as well as full chemistry WRF-Chem simulations we are studying different transport episodes that occurred during the campaign and complementing the modeling analysis with the set of aircraft and surface measurements collected during the campaign. This paper will describe some of the results derived so far from this work including an assessment of meteorological and chemical model performance and a first source attribution analysis.