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Reducing air pollution requires robust air emissions chemical transport models and these chemical transport models need detailed species information for their chemical mechanisms. SPECIATE is EPA's repository of organic gas and particulate matter (PM) chemical speciation profiles of air pollution sources. It also includes speciation of other pollutants such as mercury. Among the many uses of speciation data, these emission source profiles are used to:

• Create chemically speciated emissions inventories for regional haze, PM, greenhouse gas (GHG), and photochemical air quality modeling;
• Develop particulate carbonaceous inventories;
• Estimate hazardous air pollutant (HAP) emissions from PM and organic gas emissions (VOC);
• Provide input to the Chemical Mass Balance (CMB) receptor model; and,
• Verify profiles derived from ambient measurements by multivariate receptor models (e.g., factor analysis and positive matrix factorization)

EPA continues to update SPECIATE and make the data available both in its native Microsoft ACCESS format and through a Qlik browser. SPECIATE 5.1 was released on July 20, 2020 and contains 6,746 profiles. For the most recent version, EPA added 92 total profiles (16 organic gas, 18 particulate matter and 58 mercury profiles). These new data will assist the user community with PM, VOC, and mercury species characterization related, primarily, to oil and gas (VOC), fires (PM) and geothermal power (Hg). The release also includes improvements to the database structure, species properties information and interface with the Speciation Tool. The SPECIATE website provides the database, browser, documentation and a data developer’s guide, providing the structure for how submitters can submit/prepare data for SPECIATE use. The Data Developer’s Guide/Template was used this past year by a state agency to submit community-developed data submission to SPECIATE.

This training will provide an overview of EPA’s SPECIATE database and how it is developed and used, summarize the updates made to SPECIATE in the recent versions, and show how one could use a speciation profile to compute species emissions. After this training, users will be able to use the SPECIATE browser to study one or more species profiles of interest.

ACCESS the Qlik Browser for SPECIATE.