Title
A multi-pollutant and multi-sectorial approach to screening the consistency of emission inventories
Author
Thunis, P.
Clappier, A.
Pisoni, E.
Bessagnet, B.
Kuenen, J.
Guevara, M.
Lopez-Aparicio, S.
Publication year
2022
Abstract
Some studies show that significant uncertainties affect emission inventories, which may impeach conclusions based on air-quality model results. These uncertainties re sult from the need to compile a wide variety of information to estimate an emission inventory. In this work, we propose and discuss a screening method to compare two emission inventories, with the overall goal of improving the quality of emission inventories by feeding back the results of the screening to inventory compilers who can check the incon sistencies found and, where applicable, resolve errors. The method targets three different aspects: (1) the total emissions assigned to a series of large geographical areas, countries in our application; (2) the way these country total emissions are shared in terms of sector of activity; and (3) the way invento ries spatially distribute emissions from countries to smaller areas, cities in our application. The first step of the screen ing approach consists of sorting the data and keeping only emission contributions that are relevant enough. In a sec ond step, the method identifies, among those significant dif ferences, the most important ones that provide evidence of methodological divergence and/or errors that can be found and resolved in at least one of the inventories. The approach has been used to compare two versions of the CAMS-REG European-scale inventory over 150 cities in Europe for se lected activity sectors. Among the 4500 screened pollutant sectors, about 450 were kept as relevant, among which 46 showed inconsistencies. The analysis indicated that these in consistencies arose almost equally from large-scale reporting and spatial distribution differences. They mostly affect SO2 and PM coarse emissions from the industrial and residential sectors. The screening approach is general and can be used for other types of applications related to emission inventorie.
Subject
Air quality
Detection method
Emission inventory
Pollution control
Uncertainty analysis
Environment & Sustainability
Urbanisation
To reference this document use:
http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:2451c423-020c-4ab0-905a-14f5b264a1e9
DOI
https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-15-5271-2022
TNO identifier
972987
Publisher
Copernicus GmbH
ISSN
1991-959X
Source
Geoscientific Model Development, 15 (15), 5271-5286
Document type
article