Reflecting on progress since the 2005 NARSTO emissions inventory report

Abstract

Emission inventories are the foundation for cost-effective air quality management activities. In 2005, a report by the public/private partnership North American Research Strategy for Tropospheric Ozone (NARSTO) evaluated the strengths and weaknesses of North American emissions inventories and made recommendations for improving their effectiveness. This paper reviews the recommendation areas and briefly discusses what has been addressed, what remains unchanged, and new questions that have arisen. The findings reveal that all emissions inventory improvement areas identified by the 2005 NARSTO publication have been explored and implemented to some degree. The U.S. National Emissions Inventory has become more detailed and has incorporated new research into previously under-characterized sources such as fine particles and biomass burning. Additionally, it is now easier to access the emissions inventory and the documentation of the inventory via the internet. However, many emissions-related research needs exist, on topics such as emission estimation methods, speciation, scalable emission factor development, incorporation of new emission measurement techniques, estimation of uncertainty, top-down verification, and analysis of uncharacterized sources. A common theme throughout this retrospective summary is the need for increased coordination among stakeholders. Researchers and inventory developers must work together to ensure that planned emissions research and new findings can be used to update the emissions inventory. To continue to address emissions inventory challenges, industry, the scientific community, and government agencies need to continue to leverage resources and collaborate as often as possible. As evidenced by the progress noted, continued investment in and coordination of emissions inventory activities will provide dividends to air quality management programs across the country, continent, and world.Implications: In 2005, a report by the public/private partnership North American Research Strategy for Tropospheric Ozone (NARSTO) evaluated the strengths and weaknesses of North American air pollution emissions inventories. This paper reviews the eight recommendation areas and briefly discusses what has been addressed, what remains unchanged, and new questions that have arisen. Although progress has been made, many opportunities exist for the scientific agencies, industry, and government agencies to leverage resources and collaborate to continue improving emissions inventories.

Source-resolved variability of fine particulate matter and human exposure in an urban area

“…Recent approaches to building high-resolution traffic inventories include origin-destination by vehicle class (Ma et al, 2020), synthetic population mobility (Elessa Etuman and Coll, 2018), and fuel sales combined with traffic counts (McDonald and McBride, 2014). Other sectors such as biomass burning for residential heating and commercial cooking have been identified as very uncertain in current inventories (Day et al, 2019). Recent versions of the NEI have made progress addressing the total emissions and temporal distributions of biomass burning and commercial cooking (Eyth and Vukovich, 2016), but there is still significant uncertainty on their geographical location at the subcounty scale.…”

HERMESv3, a stand-alone multi-scale atmospheric emission modelling framework – Part 2: The bottom–up module

“…For taxi-in and taxi-out, times are also obtained from the same source, whereas for the other operations (take-off, climb out and approach) different values are assumed as a function of the type of aircraft (i.e. wide-body planes, narrow-body planes, business planes and light planes with piston engines) (Dellaert and Hulskotte, 2017). For landing operations, particulate-matter emission factors (EFwear p,i ) related to the wear of the aircraft brakes and tyres are considered (Eq.…”

Source-Resolved Variability of Fine Particulate Matter and Human Exposure in an Urban Area

“…Recent approaches to building high-resolution traffic inventories include origin-destination by vehicle class (Ma et al, 2020), synthetic population mobility (Elessa Etuman and Coll, 2018) and fuel sales combined with traffic counts (McDonald and McBride, 2014). Other sectors such as biomass burning for residential heating and commercial cooking have been identified as very uncertain in current inventories (Day et al, 2019). Recent versions of the NEI have made progress addressing the total emissions and temporal distributions of biomass burning and commercial cooking (Eyth and Vukovich, 2016), but there is still significant uncertainty on their geographical location at a sub-county scale.…”