Abstract
The usefulness of ground based air quality monitoring data for diagnostics of uncertainties in gridded emission inventories is examined. A general probabilistic procedure for comparison of levels of uncertainties in different emission datasets is developed. It implies the evaluation of the agreement between modeling results obtained with these emission datasets and corresponding measurements. This procedure is applied to the evaluation of different datasets for European gridded nitrogen oxide (NOx) emissions by using the AirBase monitoring data and the CHIMERE chemistry-transport model. Numerical experiments are performed for two different types of spatial distributions of emission uncertainties and five different types of monitors. The results are also generalized for various levels of uncertainties in simulated and measured data. It is found, in particular, that most informative, from the point of view of diagnostics of NOx emission uncertainties, are the measurements of NO2 at rural background sites and measurements of ozone at suburban sites situated in the vicinity of intensive sources of emissions. A more precise conclusion regarding the relative accuracy of two emission datasets can be drawn with a larger number of monitors in a network and a higher accuracy of the model and measurements. For example, with a network of 50 rural background NO2 monitors, the probability of choosing the more certain emission data set is more than 90 percent, if differences in uncertainty of two sets are more than 50 percent. Practical recommendations for designing or evolving surface measurement networks, in light of the study results, are given.
Highlights
Emissions of gases and particulate matter into the atmosphere are one of the major factors controlling the atmospheric composition and its changes
We analyze to what degree different monitors located within a given distance from each other can be considered as independent with respect to the information on nitrogen oxide (NOx) emission uncertainties provided by their measurements
On the one hand, our results suggest that the “suburban-source” monitors can still be useful for diagnostics of uncertainties in spatial distributions of NOx emissions
Summary
Emissions of gases and particulate matter into the atmosphere are one of the major factors controlling the atmospheric composition and its changes. Emission inventories provide inputs into the atmospheric models, which are widely used in order to understand complex physical and chemical processes in the atmosphere, to develop air quality management strategies and to predict variations in climate. An alternative approach is based on the inverse methods, which are intended to optimize emission parameters in atmospheric models by reducing the difference between simulated and measured concentration fields. Because neither of these approaches is free from potential uncertainties in resulting emission estimates, and because different assumptions and input data used in emission inventories may lead to substantially different emission estimates, it
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