The UCR EPA Environmental Chamber

The UCR EPA chamber is a new large indoor environmental chamber constructed at the University of California at Riverside (UCR) under United States EPA funding for the purpose of evaluating gas-phase and secondary aerosol mechanisms for ground-level air pollution. The major characteristics of this chamber, the results of its initial characterization for gas-phase mechanism evaluation, and examples of initial gas-phase mechanism evaluation experiments, are described. It is concluded that the chamber has lower or at most comparable background effects than other chambers previously used for mechanism evaluation, and can provide useful mechanism evaluation data at NO_x levels as low as 2 ppb. Future research directions to utilize the capabilities of this chamber are discussed.