Influence of biogenic secondary organic aerosol formation approaches on atmospheric chemistry

Global secondary organic aerosol formation (SOA) is currently assumed to be between 11.2 and 270 Tg/yr. This range of uncertainty is reflected in the gas-phase chemistry. In this study, we focus on the feedback of SOA formation on the concentrations of most important trace gases such as ozone, and compare it to the impact of monoterpene gas-phase chemistry with a newly developed reduced monoterpene mechanism (MMM) for either alpha- or beta-pinene in the global chemistry transport model MATCH-MPIC. With this set-up an uncertainty range of 3.5-4.0% increase in annually averaged tropospheric ozone was found to be caused by the gas-phase chemistry of the investigated monoterpenes. Moreover, a strong feedback has been observed for NOx, HCHO, HNO3 and PAN. These observations are affected remarkably by different SOA formation approaches like partitioning or saturation vapour pressure limitation and by the structure of the monoterpene used, e.g. reducing the impact on tropospheric ozone to 1.2-1.9% by using the partitioning approach versus the simulation with gas-phase chemistry only. Therefore, a consideration of the individual processes associated with SOA formation seems to be necessary to reduce the uncertainty in SOA formation and to understand the impact of VOCs on atmospheric chemistry.