On the attribution of contributions of atmospheric trace gases to emissions in atmospheric model applications

Abstract. We present an improved tagging method, which describes the combined effect of emissions of various species from individual emission categories, e.g. the impact of both, nitrogen oxides and non-methane hydrocarbon emissions on ozone. This method is applied to two simplified chemistry schemes, which represent the main characteristics of atmospheric ozone chemistry. Analytical solutions are presented for this tagging approach. In the past, besides tagging approaches, sensitivity methods were used, which estimate the contributions from individual sources based on differences in two simulations, a base case and a simulation with a perturbation in the respective emission category. We ap…