Guidance

Leaders: Susana Lopez-Aparicio (NILU), Marc Guevara (BSC)

Description

The focus of this WG is on the compilation of high resolution emissions to be used as basis for air quality modelling applications at urban/local scales. This is because such compilation is not fully covered by the EMEP/EEA emission inventory guidebook, which focus on national emission totals, and therefore follows uneven practices across Europe, sometimes following approaches that are systematically different from those of emission compilation at national level. One of the main aims is to provide recommendations on the necessary steps to document and compile these emission inventories to support air quality assessments and the elaboration of national and local plans and programmes under EU legislation. 

Future activities will focus on:

1. Identifying best practices through QA/QC approaches and drafting recommendations for the compilation of sectorial high resolution emission inventories that are relevant at the urban scale.
2. Elaborating recommendations for a common system to document the use of ancillary data and define the relevant meta-data that support each emission inventory at the urban scale. The metadata recommendations will provide a common documentation framework to better understand the differences between inventories. Tests will be performed to assess the feasibility of reporting emission metadata for assessment and planning based on a simpler approach.
3. Benchmarking and creating an emission dashboard (based on available downscaled EU inventories; e.g. CAMS, and bottom-up national and local inventories) to monitor progress and identify inconsistencies among inventories. Regular inter-comparisons will be carried out to support this objective.
4. Using the Composite Mapping platform (1) as spatial information support to evaluate specific sectors/ topics identified as inconsistency by the dashboard and (2) to carry out emission evaluation in relation with activities of the composite mapping for assessment purposes
5. Providing relevant feedback to improve European inventories used for regulatory purposes in the context of EMEP, CAMS-REG and/or European research projects (e.g. RI-URBANS).

Documents

• Cookbook for Use of the Δ - Emission Tool (September 2015)
• Δ - Emission Tool User's guide (March 2015)

Publications

• Emission ensemble approach to improve the development of multi-scale emission inventories (2024 under review)
• A multi-pollutant and multi-sectorial approach to screening the consistency of emission inventories (2022)
• A probabilistic approach to screen and improve emission inventories (2020)
• Spatial inter-comparison of Top-down emission inventories in European urban areas (2018)
• Assessment of discrepancies between bottom-up and regional emission inventories in Norwegian urban areas (2017)
• A benchmarking tool to screen and compare bottom-up and top-down emission inventories (2016)
• A novel approach to screen and compare bottom-up vs. top-down emission inventories (2016)

Tools and datasets

• ECMAP - Emissions (2024)
• ECMap - Database

WG7 Meetings