Abstract. A new method is presented for estimating urban hydroxyl radical (OH)
concentrations using the downwind decay of the ratio of nitrogen dioxide
over carbon monoxide column-mixing ratios (XNO2/XCO) retrieved from
the Tropospheric Monitoring Instrument (TROPOMI). The method makes use of
plumes simulated by the Weather Research and Forecast model (WRF-Chem) using
passive-tracer transport, instead of the encoded chemistry, in combination
with auxiliary input variables such as Copernicus Atmospheric Monitoring
Service (CAMS) OH, Emission Database for Global Atmospheric Research v4.3.2
(EDGAR) NOx and CO emissions, and National Center for Environmental
Protection (NCEP)-based meteorological data. NO2 and CO mixing ratios
from the CAMS reanalysis are used as initial and lateral boundary
conditions. WRF overestimates NO2 plumes close to the center of the
city by 15 % to 30 % in summer and 40 % to 50 % in winter
compared to TROPOMI observations over Riyadh. WRF-simulated CO plumes differ
by 10 % with TROPOMI in both seasons. The differences between WRF and
TROPOMI are used to optimize the OH concentration, NOx, CO emissions and
their backgrounds using an iterative least-squares method. To estimate OH, WRF
is optimized using (a) TROPOMI XNO2/XCO and (b) TROPOMI-derived XNO2 only. For summer, both the NO2/CO ratio optimization and the
XNO2 optimization increase the prior OH from CAMS by 32 ± 5.3 % and 28.3 ± 3.9 %, respectively. EDGAR NOx and CO emissions
over Riyadh are increased by 42.1 ± 8.4 % and 101 ± 21 %,
respectively, in summer. In winter, the optimization method doubles the CO
emissions while increasing OH by ∼ 52 ± 14 % and
reducing NOx emissions by 15.5 ± 4.1 %. TROPOMI-derived OH
concentrations and the pre-existing exponentially modified Gaussian function fit (EMG) method differ by 10 % in summer and
winter, confirming that urban OH concentrations can be reliably estimated
using the TROPOMI-observed NO2/CO ratio. Additionally, our method can
be applied to a single TROPOMI overpass, allowing one to analyze day-to-day
variability in OH, NOx and CO emission.