The influence of spatiality on shipping emissions, air quality and potential human exposure in Yangtze River Delta/Shanghai, China

Abstract

<p><strong>Abstract.</strong> The Yangtze River Delta (YRD) and the megacity of Shanghai are host to one of the busiest port clusters in the world, the region also suffers from high levels of air pollution. The goal of this study was to estimate the contributions of shipping to emissions, air quality, and population exposure and characterize their dependence on the geographic spatiality of ship lanes from the regional scale to city scale for 2015. The WRF-CMAQ model was used to simulate the influence of coastal and inland-water shipping, in port emissions, shipping-related cargo transport on air quality and, population-weighted concentrations, a measure of human exposure. Our results showed that the impact of shipping on air quality in the YRD was attributable primarily to shipping emissions within 12 NM of shore, but emissions coming from the coastal area of 24 to 96 NM still contributed substantially to ship-related PM<sub>2.5</sub> concentrations in YRD. The overall contribution of ships to PM<sub>2.5</sub> concentration in YRD could reach to 4.62 μg/m<sup>3</sup> in summer when monsoon winds transport shipping emissions onshore. In Shanghai city, inland-water going ships were major contributors (40–80 %) to the shipping impact on urban air quality. Given the proximity of inland-water ships to urban populations of Shanghai, the emissions of inland-water ships contributed more to population-weighted concentrations. These research results provide scientific evidence to inform policies for controlling future shipping emissions; in particular, stricter standards could be considered for the ships on inland rivers and other waterways close to residential regions.</p>

Trace Elements From Ocean‐Going Vessels in East Asia: Vanadium and Nickel Emissions and Their Impacts on Air Quality

“…Our estimate of NO x compares favorably with the estimates of 1.4–2.2 Tg reported in other studies (Chen et al., 2017; Ding et al., 2018; M. Fu et al., 2017; Li et al., 2018a; Lv et al., 2018) in the same region. Our SO 2 estimate is lower than the values (0.92–1.3 Tg) reported in other studies (Chen et al., 2017; Fu et al., 2017; Li et al., 2018a; Lv et al., 2018), mainly because the sulfur content of the fuel burned by the main engines was set to 1.5% for domestic coastal ships (Feng et al., 2019) in this study, which is lower than the sulfur contents (2.43%–2.7%) in other studies (Chen et al., 2017; Fu et al., 2017; Li et al., 2018a; Lv et al., 2018). The comparison of SO 2 and NO x from shipping with other studies could help guarantee the shipping originated V and Ni in this study since few studies has reported trace element emissions from shipping.…”

“…The Community Multiscale Air Quality (CMAQ; Byun & Schere, 2006) is a widely used air quality modeling system containing interactions of multiple complex atmospheric processes. The ability of the CMAQ model to simulate air quality from the urban scale to the hemisphere scale has been demonstrated in other studies (Feng et al., 2019; Mathur et al., 2017; Sarwar et al., 2012; Xing et al., 2015; Zhao et al., 2021). In this study, we revised the multi‐pollutant code of the aerosol module and in‐line dust emission module in CMAQ version 5.3 to simulate ambient concentrations of vanadium (V) and nickel (Ni) in airborne PM.…”

“…The emission factors used in V and Ni emission estimates were updated to five classification schemes described in Text of the supporting information with Tables S1 and S2, and the details of the method and value of low‐load adjustment multipliers and control factors can be found in our previous studies (Fan et al., 2016; Feng et al., 2019). Average sulfur content for HFO and MDO fuel was set to 2.7% and 0.5% (Chen et al., 2017; Feng et al., 2019; Li et al., 2018a; Ng et al., 2013). According to the China Marine Bunker's statistic data (Fan et al., 2016; Feng et al., 2019), we allocated the fuel oil types for low/medium/high speed engines and choose the emission factors of V and Ni according to the oil types for calculations.…”

“…The rising economy and increasing demand for seaborne trade are pushing growth in the shipping industry at the global level, especially in East Asia. Within this context, there have been numerous studies on the regional‐ and global‐scale effects of ship emissions on climate, ambient air quality and human health (Corbett & Koehler, 2003; Corbett et al., 2007; Dalsøren et al., 2009; Endresen et al., 2003; Eyring et al., 2010; Feng et al., 2019; Liu et al., 2016b; Sofiev et al., 2018; Zhao et al., 2020). However, most studies of air quality and health impact of shipping mainly focused on the bulk PM 2.5 and some of its precursors (e.g., SO 2 , NO x , and volatile organic compounds), there are few quantitative studies that have discussed about large‐scale air pollution of trace metals in PM 2.5 from ship exhausts.…”

Modeling the Impact of Marine DMS Emissions on Summertime Air Quality Over the Coastal East China Seas

“…The MEIC and MIX inventories used the latest available emission data, with the MEIC inventory for the year of 2016 and the MIX inventory for the year of 2010. The shipping emissions were calculated using the model developed by Fan et al (2016), and the detailed principle and method have been previously described (Feng et al, 2019). The spatial distributions of SO 2 emissions generated by human activities are shown in Figure 1.…”