Evaluating the climate and air quality impacts of short-lived pollutants

Abstract

Abstract. This paper presents a summary of the work done within the European Union's Seventh Framework Programme project ECLIPSE (Evaluating the Climate and Air Quality Impacts of Short-Lived Pollutants). ECLIPSE had a unique systematic concept for designing a realistic and effective mitigation scenario for short-lived climate pollutants (SLCPs; methane, aerosols and ozone, and their precursor species) and quantifying its climate and air quality impacts, and this paper presents the results in the context of this overarching strategy. The first step in ECLIPSE was to create a new emission inventory based on current legislation (CLE) for the recent past and until 2050. Substantial progress compared to previous work was made by including previously unaccounted types of sources such as flaring of gas associated with oil production, and wick lamps. These emission data were used for present-day reference simulations with four advanced Earth system models (ESMs) and six chemistry transport models (CTMs). The model simulations were compared with a variety of ground-based and satellite observational data sets from Asia, Europe and the Arctic. It was found that the models still underestimate the measured seasonality of aerosols in the Arctic but to a lesser extent than in previous studies. Problems likely related to the emissions were identified for northern Russia and India, in particular. To estimate the climate impacts of SLCPs, ECLIPSE followed two paths of research: the first path calculated radiative Published by Copernicus Publications on behalf of the European Geosciences Union. A. Stohl et al.: Evaluating the climate and air quality impacts of short-lived pollutantsforcing (RF) values for a large matrix of SLCP species emissions, for different seasons and regions independently. Based on these RF calculations, the Global Temperature change Potential metric for a time horizon of 20 years (GTP 20 ) was calculated for each SLCP emission type. This climate metric was then used in an integrated assessment model to identify all emission mitigation measures with a beneficial air quality and short-term (20-year) climate impact. These measures together defined a SLCP mitigation (MIT) scenario. Compared to CLE, the MIT scenario would reduce global methane (CH 4 ) and black carbon (BC) emissions by about 50 and 80 %, respectively. For CH 4 , measures on shale gas production, waste management and coal mines were most important. For non-CH 4 SLCPs, elimination of high-emitting vehicles and wick lamps, as well as reducing emissions from gas flaring, coal and biomass stoves, agricultural waste, solvents and diesel engines were most important. These measures lead to large reductions in calculated surface concentrations of ozone and particulate matter. We estimate that in the EU, the loss of statistical life expectancy due to air pollution was 7.5 months in 2010, which will be reduced to 5.2 months by 2030 in the CLE scenario. The MIT scenario would reduce this value by another 0.9 to 4.3 months. Substantially larger reductions du...

Effects of long-range aerosol transport on the microphysical properties of low-level liquid clouds in the Arctic

“…Studies that have used FLEXPART CO concentration fields (χ CO ) have found satisfactory agreement between model output and measurements (Stohl, 2006;Paris et al, 2009;Hirdman et al, 2010;Sodemann et al, 2011;Stohl et al, 2013Stohl et al, , 2015Eckhardt et al, 2015). In the Alaskan Arctic for the day of 18 April 2008, Warneke et al (2009) described a slope of 0.9 for a linear fit between FLEXPART model output of χ CO and airborne measurements of CO with a least-squares correlation coefficient of 0.63.…”

“…The CO tracer used for this study is considered as passive in the atmosphere but is removed from the simulation 31 days after emission, thus focusing the simulation on "fresh" pollution. For the CO emissions, ECLIPSE (Evaluating the CLimate and Air Quality ImPacts of Short livEd pollutants) version 4.0 emission data (Klimont et al, 2016;Stohl et al, 2015) are used. For the anthropogenic emissions considered here, the ECLIPSE emissions are based on the GAINS (Greenhouse gas-Air pollution Interaction and Synergies) model (Amann et al, 2011).…”

Global anthropogenic emissions of particulate matter including black carbon

“…unpaved roads. The ECLIPSE emission datasets have been used in several regional and global atmospheric transport and climate model simulations (AMAP, 2015;Eckhardt et al, 2015;Gadhavi et al, 2015;Lund et al, 2014;Quennehen et al, 2016;Stohl et al, 2013Stohl et al, , 2015Wobus et al, 2016;Yttri et al, 2014) where various aspects of several particulate matter species were addressed. The emissions developed during ECLIPSE also served as the basis for a recently published global particulate number estimate (Paasonen et al, 2016).…”

Source influence on emission pathways and ambient PM<sub>2.5</sub> pollution over India (2015–2050)

“…In addition to the emissions described in section 2.2.2, other open burning emissions were derived from the global GFED-4s database (Akagi et al 2011;Andreae et al 2001;Giglio et al 2013;Randerson et al 2012;van der Werf et al 2010) addition to the species in this inventory, ammonia or NH3 emissions, important for calculating secondary particulate matter, were taken from the MIX emission inventory (Li et al 2017; http://meicmodel.org/dataset-mix.html). The model solves for the temporal and spatial evolution of aerosols and gaseous compounds using meteorological data sets, emission inventories, and equations that represent the physics and chemistry of the atmosphere.…”