Impact of the vertical emission profiles on ground-level 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 recommandations, three others with vertical injection profiles derived from the EMEP recommandations but multiplying the injection height by respectively 0.75, 0.50 and 0.25, while the last one uses vertical profiles derived from the recent literature. It is shown that using injection heights lower than the EMEP recommandations leads to significantly improved simulation of SO2, NO2 and O3 concentrations when compared to the Airbase station measurements.