Urban Air Pollution and Traffic Emissions: New prospects from an analysis at high temporal resolution

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This project wants to apply trace gas and particle measurements with very high temporal resolution at an urban traffic site in order to develop our understanding of pollution dynamics and emissions from traffic. Although the level of understanding about emissions and air pollutant concentrations is rather well developed, novel techniques shall enable us to analyze emission ratios NO / NO2 / NOx of single vehicles and cohorts of vehicles, the impact and interaction of these NOx emissions with the O3 chemistry, the emission ratios NH3 / CO2 and NOx / CO2 with very high temporal resolution, and the emissions of aerosol particles in a very wide spectrum of sizes (few nm up to at least 1 µm diameters) with 10 Hz resolution. New prospects will be opened on the understanding of aerosol dynamics directly after the emission from various types of vehicles under real-world conditions. The proposed concepts are in line with other recent concepts of urban air pollution and emission analysis such as multi-sensor approaches, mobile platform measurements, and eddy covariance. We propose basic research which will eventually and, in combination with other techniques and modelling activities, help to understand the urban landscape, which is influenced by a multitude of processes of high temporal and spatial variabilities. Bottom-up approaches to understand urban air pollution will become feasible. The core experiment will be a 18-month curbside measurement. Two intensive operation periods (IOPs) will add further aspects of spatial representativeness and more detailed information of the chemical composition of particles in their size spectra.