Impact of Solvent Emissions on Reactive Aromatics and Ozone in the Great Lakes Region

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The highest contributing factor was evaporative emissions which are attributed to propane and natural gas filling/storage facilities. Are these large scale operations supporting home heating or personal use tanks for cooking? Are there any large scale industrial sized gas storage facilities in Windsor or Detroit that could be contributing or numerous smaller scale operations filling tanks for cooking and heating? 

 

Commercial cooking emits large amounts of VOC but were not differentiated as part of this or previous receptor modeling assessments. This sector has not traditionally been part of the U.S. emission inventory but recent studies suggest it can be a significant source of VOC emissions in urban areas. The receptor modeling doesn't need to be updated but some recognition that this sector is not distinguished would be worthwhile and that some other sector contributions may be conflated to some degree as a result. 

 

How were VCPs allocated from year to month and to specific days (day of week)? How were daily VCP emissions allocated to hour of the day? These types of emissions might be higher when temperatures are higher so this allocation of emissions to days and hours is important so emissions are not smeared out across cold/cooler days of the year when less emissions would be expected.

 

What would Figure 3 look like if there was a third pie chart that showed contribution based on OH reactivity? Some of these sectors might have a lot of VOC but the type of VOC might not be very active in photochemistry. 

 

Is Table 2 for VCP emissions or all VOC emissions from all sectors? It is hard to understand what is being compared there and how meaningful it is given all the potential averaging of very different source types. 

 

A little more description of the gas phase chemistry in the model. 

 

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 2 Report

The writing is well tailored, and the explanations are often reasonable. However, sometimes, at some points, the submitted research leaves something to be desired. Nevertheless, the presented manuscript could be recommended for the publication after a major revision and amendments following these next comments:

 

1.      In abstract, author should avoid the use of very long sentences and abbreviations phrases.

2.      In Table 1, Some chemical formulas must be subscripted. For example, C₂H₆….

3.      The main objectives and novelty aspects in this study should be highlighted clearly within the introduction section.

4.      In Figure 4, the units of the two coordinates should be marked.

5.      Discussions should be supported with more qualitative findings of the study.

6.      References should be revised to ensure that volume, and start-ending pages are provided, whenever possible.

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx