A new bottom-up emissions estimation approach for aircraft sources in support of air quality modelling for community-scale assessments around airports

Abstract

Transportation infrastructure (including roadway traffic, ports, and airports) is critical to the nation's economy. With a growing economy, aircraft activity is expected to grow across the world. In the US, airport-related emissions, while generally small, are not an insignificant source of air pollution and related adverse health effects. However, currently there is a lack of tools that can easily be applied to study near-source pollution and explore the benefits of improvements to air quality and exposures. Screening-level air quality modelling is a useful tool for examining urban-scale air quality impacts of airport operations. Spatially-resolved aircraft emissions are needed for the screening-level modelling. In order to create spatially-resolved aircraft emissions, we developed a bottom-up emissions estimation methodology that includes data from a global chorded inventory dataset from the aviation environmental design tool (AEDT). The initial implementation of this method was performed for Los Angeles International Airport (LAX). This paper describes a new emissions estimation methodology for aircraft emissions in support of community-scale assessments of air quality around airports and presents an illustration of its application at the Los Angeles International Airport during the LAX 2011/2012 Air Quality Source Apportionment Study.