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SPECIATE Version 4.4 Database Development Documentation
Citation:
Hsu, Y., F. Divita, AND J. Dorn. SPECIATE Version 4.4 Database Development Documentation. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Washington, DC, 2014.
Impact/Purpose:
Improvements in the accuracy and completeness of air pollutant emissions information in inventories and integrated emission parameterizations used in chemical transport models will result in the best available information and tools for decisions on cost-effective control strategies. SPECIATE fills the roll of capturing speciated emissions information from ORD research in a database that can be use by modelers to improve emissions inventories. Improvements in information on emissions results in better air quality model assessment. Finally, strengthened understanding of the spatial and temporal distribution of air pollution emissions will result in more accurate exposure assessment for ecological and health research.
Description:
SPECIATE is the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) repository of volatile organic gas and particulate matter (PM) speciation profiles of air pollution sources. Some of the many uses of these source profiles include: (1) creating speciated emissions inventories for regional haze, PM, greenhouse gas (GHG), and photochemical air quality modeling; (2) estimating hazardous and toxic air pollutant emissions from PM and organic gas primary emissions; (3) providing input to chemical mass balance (CMB) receptor models; and, (4) verifying profiles derived from ambient measurements by multivariate receptor models (e.g., factor analysis and positive matrix factorization).This report documents the updates that EPA applied to SPECIATE version 4.3 to develop the SPECIATE 4.4 database. EPA generated SPECIATE 4.4 by appending 104 volatile organic gas profiles and 32 PM profiles to the SPECIATE 4.3 database. In total, the SPECIATE 4.4 database includes 5,728 PM, volatile organic compound (VOC), total organic gases (TOG), and Other Gases profiles. The SPECIATE 4.4 database also contains a table titled “Semi-volatile Organic Compounds (SVOC) Splitting Factors” that provides suggested SVOC partitioning factors in PM and gaseous phases.