Preparation of a Spatialised Emission Inventory as Input for Modelling

A collaborative research project between the European Commission¿s Joint Research Center and the Lombardy Region, both located in Northern Italy, aims to identify the best pollution reduction strategies in this area and to set a framework solving such complex problem for whichever area in Europe. Advanced numerical air quality models (AQMs) have become an essential tool for analyzing the effect of the implementation of pollutant emission abatement strategies and for the integrated assessment modeling. Spatialized emission inventories compatible with the requirement of Eulerian chemical transport model (CTM) represent one of the most crucial issues for performing reliable air quality simulations. Therefore a spatialized atmospheric emission inventory concerning major pollutants (CO, NOx, SO2, CH4, PM10, PM2.5, NH3 and VOC) was elaborated for all regions of Northern Italy putting together information collected from the institutions in charge of emission inventories at regional and national scale. This paper will address the methodology, the steps followed and the difficulties encountered to prepare a high quality spatialized emission inventory as input to AQMs. In the case presented here, the major challenge was to include, as much as possible, bottom-up emissions information elaborated by the regional authorities. All the problems of data collection, homogenization and merge had to be faced, considering that each of the 10 Regions in Northern Italy is in charge of its own air quality plan and emission inventory. For the area of interest (570x390 km2) emission data, coming both from the regional and the Italian national emission inventories, were put together and consolidated. For the countries outside Italy, the European emission inventory (EMEP) was used. In general, two kinds of emissions data sets with different aggregation level were acquired and merged as input to the spatialized emission inventory of Northern Italy: - INEMAR (INventario EMissioni ARia) ¿ a database created for an implementation of high-quality regional emission inventory estimating the emissions of several pollutants at municipal level mainly with a bottom-up approach. INEMAR is currently used by most of the regions in Northern Italy. - Italian national emission inventory ¿ a database that collects and calculates all the emissions at national level and provides an estimation at provincial level applying a top-down disaggregation. Priority was given to the INEMAR emissions data at municipal level where available (i.e. fully completed for three of the Northern Italian regions and partially completed for the other regions). The rest of the data were covered by the use of the national emission inventory at provincial level, which was further disaggregated at municipal level using various proxies. The resulting emission inventory has then been spatialized on a 3x3 km grid.

TRIACCHINI Giuseppe;  PASTORELLO Cinzia;  GZELLA Artur;  DILARA Panagiota; 

2009-07-28

Environmental Protection Agency

JRC49789

http://www.epa.gov/ttn/chief/conference/ei18/index.html,    http://www.epa.gov/ttn/chief/conference/ei18/session3/triacchini.pdf,    https://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/handle/JRC49789,