A novel approach to screen and compare emission inventories

A methodology is proposed to support the evaluation and comparison of different types of emission inventories, and more specifically the comparison of bottom-up versus top-down approaches. The strengths and weaknesses of the methodology are presented and discussed based on an example. The approach results in a “diamond” diagram useful to flag out anomalous behaviors in the emission inventories and to get insight on possible explanations. In particular, the “diamond” diagram is shown to provide meaningful information in terms of: discrepancies between the total emissions reported by macro-sector and pollutant, contribution of each macro-sector to the total amount of emissions released by pollutant, and the identification and quantification of the different factors causing the discrepancies between total emissions. Its main strength as an indicator is to allow investigating the relative contribution of activity and weighted emission factors. A practical example in Barcelona is used for testing and to provide relevant information for the analyzed emission datasets. The tests show the capability of the proposed methodology to flag inconsistencies in the existing inventories. The proposed methodology system may be useful for regional and urban inventory developers as an initial evaluation of the consistency of their inventories.

THUNIS Philippe;  DEGRAEUWE Bart;  CUVELIER Cornelis;  GUEVARA Marc;  TARRASON Leonor;  CLAPPIER Alain; 

2016-04-20

SPRINGER INTERNATIONAL PUBLISHING AG

JRC96440

1873-9318,   

http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11869-016-0402-7,    https://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/handle/JRC96440,   

10.1007/s11869-016-0402-7,