ANALYSIS OF TEMPERATURE AND SPECIFIC HUMIDITY DEPENDENCE OF MOVES OUTPUT FOR MOTOR VEHICLE EMISSIONS

Abstract

Air pollution and climate change are some of the important consequences of modern

industrialization. In a large developed country like the United States of America, these

changes have a greater impact due to the country’s high energy demands. This project

focuses on air pollution caused by emissions released by combustion of fuels in automobile

engines. The mobile emissions inventory for the National Emissions Inventory (NEI)

is based on the estimates from MOtor Vehicle Emissions Simulator (MOVES), which is

a software program used to model automobile emissions. Analysis of in-situ roadside

monitor observations shows that emissions from automobile sources, especially CO and

NOx emissions are correlated with ambient temperature and humidity. In this research, I

compared the MOVES model output dependence on ambient temperature and specific humidity

to observations from an Air quality Monitoring Site which is located in Maryland

on Interstate-95 (I-95) and adjusted the model output to nearly match the observations.

The adjusted model was used to obtain emissions estimates of another month (here, Nov

2014) and these estimated ratios nearly matched with the observations.