Atmospheric Emission Modelling: From Inventories to Air Quality Model Grids
Nele Veldeman
Nele.veldeman@vito.be
Flemish Institute for Technological Research, Boeretang 200, B-2400 Mol
Belgium
Wim Peelaerts
Wim.peelaerts@vito.be
Flemish Institute for Technological Research, Boeretang 200, B-2400 Mol
Belgium
Lisa Blyth
Lisa.blyth@vito.be
Flemish Institute for Technological Research, Boeretang 200, B-2400 Mol
Belgium
Emission data are crucial input to air quality models. When applying models at the city level at
high resolution, it is of paramount importance that the geographical information of the emissions
has the same scale as the level on which the concentration levels need to be calculated.
An alternative to bottom-up emission inventories, is the top-down disaggregation of emission
totals reported by supranational or global inventories. Emission totals can be downscaled to grids
of a higher resolution by using spatial surrogate data which specify fractions of the emissions
realized in a particular country that should be allocated to a particular grid cell of the air quality
model domain of interest. Examples of such spatial surrogates are population maps, spatially
resolved industrial production data or mapped traffic census data.
E-MAP (Emission Mapper) is a GIS based tool developed by VITO to spatially disaggregate
emissions over different air quality model grids [1]. In this contribution we present various
applications of air quality modelling in which high resolution emissions were provided by the EMAP tool, thus illustrating its wide range of possibilities.
 E-MAP played an important role within the SHIPFLUX project (Science for a Sustainable
Development Research programme, BELSPO). In this project, the Atmospheric deposition
fluxes to the Belgian marine waters originating from ship emissions were investigated.
 Within the FP7- PASODOBLE (Promote Air Quality Services integrating Observations –
Development Of Basic Localised Information for Europe) project, E-MAP provided high
resolution emissions for the Urban Forecasting Services for 5 Belgian Cities [2].
 Within the AMFIC framework (Air Quality Monitoring and Forecasting in China) the effect
of local measures to improve air quality during the Olympic Games in Beijing was studied.
High resolution emission maps for different Chinese cities, were obtained with E-MAP [3].
In each of these projects the E-MAP tool is (indirectly) validated by comparing air quality model
results with local measurement data. The overall quality of the validation provides confidence in
the methodology and the tool.
[1] J. Maes et al., Atmospheric Environment 43, 1246-1254 (2009)
[2] http://www.myair-eu.org/
[3] http://www.amfic.eu/