Incorporating cooking emissions to better simulate the impact of zero-emission vehicle adoption on ozone pollution in Los Angeles

We incorporate cooking volatile organic compound (VOC) emissions in a chemical transport model and evaluate it against observations in order to improve the model representation of the present-day ozone chemical regime in LA. Using this updated model, we investigate the impact of adopting zero-emission vehicles (ZEVs) on ozone pollution with increased confidence.

We show that mitigating on-road gasoline emissions through ZEV adoption would benefit both air quality and climate by substantially reducing anthropogenic nitrogen oxides (NO x ) and carbon dioxide (CO 2 ) emissions in LA by 28 and 41% during the summertime, respectively. This would result in a moderate reduction of O 3 pollution, decreasing the average number of population-weighted O 3 exceedance days in August from 9 to 6 days, and would shift the majority of LA, except for the coastline, into a NO x -limited regime.