Impact of the vertical emission profiles on background gas-phase pollution simulated from the EMEP emissions over Europe

Five one-year air quality simulations over a domain covering Europe have been performed using the CHIMERE chemistry transport model and the EMEP emission dataset for Europe. These five simulations differ only by the representation of the effective emission heights for anthropogenic emissions: one has been run using the EMEP standard recommendations, three others with vertical injection profiles derived from the EMEP recommendations but multiplying the injection height by 0.75, 0.50 and 0.25, respectively, while the last one uses vertical profiles derived from the recent literature. It is shown that using injection heights lower than the EMEP recommendations leads to significantly improved simulation of background SO₂, NO₂ and O₃ concentrations when compared to the Airbase station measurements.