Investigating Urban Ozone Formation and Chemistry from Volatile Chemical Products (VCPs) and Other Non-Traditional Urban VOC Sources across the Los Angeles Basin

Recent work has shown that emissions of volatile chemical products (VCPs) including personal care products, cleaning agents, coatings, adhesives, and pesticides contribute substantially to the volatile organic compound (VOC) budget in urban areas and can be an important source of anthropogenic ozone (O₃) and acyl peroxy nitrate (PAN) production. In this work, through detailed Lagrangian box modeling we investigate the impacts of non-traditional sector-specific VCPs and cooking emissions on ozone formation in the Los Angeles Basin during the summer of 2021. The model is initialized with bottom-up emissions from the FIVE-VCP inventory and utilizes chemical mechanism schemes updated to include key VCPs and cooking emission markers. We evaluate the simulated NOx-VOC chemistry by comparing to measurements from the Southwest Urban NOx and VOC Experiment (SUNVEx) and perform sensitivity analyses to investigate the spatial and temporal ozone photochemical regimes across the region.