Estimating PM2.5 emissions from BC/OC emissions

A) If the emission inventory only has BC and OC emissions, how do you estimate the PM2.5 and PM10 primary emissions from BC/OC emissions to feed to SMOKE for emissions processing?

B) Related question: If aircraft emissions data only have BC emissions, how do you estimate the PM2.5 and PM10 primary emissions from the BC emission to feed to SMOKE for emissions processing?

A) Since chemical speciation is process-specific, you could do this by SCC. That is, find the chemical speciation profile for the sector/process of interest from the SMOKE ancillary files, and knowing the BC and OC fractions, scale up to compute the total PM2.5. For PM10, you need to add the PMC estimate, which is mostly from seasalt and dust. So, not all SCCs will have tthe PMC portion. Having said that, note that having BC and OC already estimated is a good thing, since you may have better confidence in those explicit estimates.

For (B), refer to Wayson et al, JAWMA 2009 and Wilkerson et al, ACP 2010 for more information. Wayson breaks down aircraft jet exhaust and has an approach based on Smoke number to estimate the volatile (organics and sulfate) and non-volatile (BC) components of PM