2021 Global top-down VOC emissions based on TROPOMI formaldehyde and glyoxal data

Top-down global VOC emission distributions in 2021 (in 10^10 molecules cm-2 s-1) for (i) isoprene, (ii) anthropogenic VOC glyoxal precursors, (iii) anthropogenic VOC non-glyoxal precursors, (iv) biomass burning VOC, and (v) unspecified VOC glyoxal precursor.

The top-down emissions are inferred from an inverse modelling scheme built on the chemistry-transport model MAGRITTEv1.2 and its adjoint (Müller et al., 2019; Bauwens et al., 2016; Müller and Stavrakou, 2005), constrained by TROPOMI HCHO (De Smedt et al., 2018) and CHOCHO (Lerot et al., 2021) column data through a two-compound inversion framework.

The chemical mechanism of MAGRITTEv1.1 (Müller et al., 2019) already included the oxidation of six glyoxal precursors: isoprene (C5H8), acetylene (C2H2), and ethene (C2H4), and the common BTX aromatics benzene (C6H6), toluene (C7H8) and xylenes (C8H10). The new mechanism in MAGRITTEv1.2 includes the following additional aromatics: trimethylbenzene (C9H12), styrene (C8H8), ethylbenzene (C8H10), phenol (C6H6O), cresol (C7H8O), catechols (C6H6O2) and methylcatechols (C7H8O2), benzaldehyde (C7H6O), (methyl-) perbenzoic acid (C7H6O3), methylperoxybenzoylnitrate (C7H5O5N), nitrophenols and nitrocatechols (C6H5O3N), generic C4 and C5 intermediates (C4H4O2 and C5H6O2).

Global, monthly emissions are available in NetCDF format at a resolution of 2°x2.5°.