Assessing ozone abatement scenarios in the framework of the Spanish ozone mitigation plan

Tropospheric ozone (O3) is a secondary air pollutant that affects human health, vegetation and climate, especially in Mediterranean countries such as Spain. In order to tackle this long-standing issue, the Spanish government recently started to design the Spanish O3 Mitigation Plan. To support this initiative and ultimately provide recommendations, we performed a first ambitious emission and air quality modeling exercise. This study presents the development of different emission scenarios - aligned with or beyond the measures planned for 2030 in Spain - and the modeling of their respective impact on the O3 pollution across Spain (in July 2019) with both MONARCH and WRF-CMAQ air quality models. The modeling experiments include a base case scenario, a so-called planned emission (PE) scenario integrating the expected emission changes related to 2030, and a set of specific emission scenarios in which additional emission changes are applied to specific sectors (on e.g., road transport, maritime traffic) on top of the PE scenario. The planned emission scenario considerably reduces daily 8-h maximum O3 concentrations (−4 μg/m3 on average), with strongest reductions in Madrid region, north of Catalonia, Valencia region, Galicia and Andalusia. The frequency of observed daily exceedances of the 120 μg/m3 daily 8-h maximum target value and 180 μg/m3 hourly information threshold could be reduced by −37 and −77 %, respectively. The results of the specific scenarios highlight road transport and maritime traffic as two key emission sectors contributing to O3 pollution, over the entire country and the Mediterranean coast, respectively, while solvent use and industry emissions have a more limited and localized impact on O3. In any case, even with the implementation of all the emission scenarios, daily exceedances of the aforementioned thresholds will still be recorded over the country.This research has received funding from the Ramon y Cajal grant (RYC2021-034511-I, MCIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033 and European Union NextGener-ationEU/PRTR), from the Ministerio para la Transición Ecológica y el Reto Demográfico (MITECO) as part of the Plan Nacional del Ozono project (BOE-A-2021- 20183), as well as through the MITIGATE (PID2020-116324RA695 I00/AEI/10.13039/501100011033) and VITALISE projects (PID2019-108086RA-I00, MCIN/ AEI/10.13039/501100011033) both funded by the Agencia Estatal de Investigacion (AEI). We also acknowledge the AXA Research Fund and Red Temática ACTRIS España (CGL2017-90884-REDT), and H2020 ACTRIS IMP (#871115), as well as the computer resources at MareNostrum and the technical support provided by the Barcelona Supercomputing Center through the RES (AECT-2022-1-0008, AECT-2022-2-0003).Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version