A global anthropogenic emission inventory of atmospheric pollutants from sector- and fuel-specific sources (1970–2017): an application of the Community Emissions Data System (CEDS)

• Published in: Earth system science data Vol. 12; no. 4; pp. 3413 - 3442
• Main Authors: McDuffie, Erin E., Smith, Steven J., O'Rourke, Patrick, Tibrewal, Kushal, Venkataraman, Chandra, Marais, Eloise A., Zheng, Bo, Crippa, Monica, Brauer, Michael, Martin, Randall V.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Katlenburg-Lindau Copernicus GmbH 15-12-2020; Copernicus Publications
• Subjects: Aerosols; Aggregation; Agriculture; Air pollution; Annual; Anthropogenic factors; Atmospheric models; Biofuels; Black carbon; Carbon; Carbon monoxide; Carbon monoxide emissions; Coal-fired power plants; Combustion; Consumption; Datasets; Emission inventories; Emissions; Emissions control; Energy; Energy industry; Environmental health; Environmental impact; Estimates; Fluxes; Global aerosols; Human influences; Industrial plant emissions; Liquid fuels; Natural gas; Nitrogen compounds; Nitrogen dioxide; Nitrogen oxides; Organic carbon; Organic compounds; Pollutants; Pollution sources; Procedures; Residential energy; Road transportation; Roads; Scaling; Shipping; Solvents; Source code; Sulfur dioxide; Trends; VOCs; Volatile organic compounds; United States > US; Europe; China; Africa; India
• ISSN: 1866-3516; 1866-3508; 1866-3516
• DOI: 10.5194/essd-12-3413-2020

Global anthropogenic emission inventories remain vital
for understanding the sources of atmospheric pollution and the associated impacts on the environment, human health, and society.
Rapid changes in today's society require that these inventories provide
contemporary estimates of multiple atmospheric pollutants with both source
sector and fuel type information to understand and effectively mitigate
future impacts. To fill this need, we have updated the open-source Community
Emissions Data System (CEDS) (Hoesly et al., 2019) to
develop a new global emission inventory, CEDSGBD-MAPS. This inventory
includes emissions of seven key atmospheric pollutants (NOx; CO;
SO2; NH3; non-methane volatile organic compounds, NMVOCs; black carbon, BC; organic carbon, OC) over the time period from 1970–2017
and reports annual country-total emissions as a function of 11 anthropogenic
sectors (agriculture; energy generation; industrial processes;
on-road and non-road transportation; separate residential, commercial, and other
sectors (RCO); waste; solvent use; and international shipping) and four fuel
categories (total coal, solid biofuel, the sum of liquid-fuel and
natural-gas combustion, and remaining process-level emissions). The
CEDSGBD-MAPS inventory additionally includes monthly global gridded
(0.5∘ × 0.5∘) emission fluxes for each compound, sector, and fuel type to facilitate their
use in earth system models. CEDSGBD-MAPS utilizes updated activity
data, updates to the core CEDS default scaling procedure, and modifications
to the final procedures for emissions gridding and aggregation. Relative to the previous CEDS inventory (Hoesly et
al., 2018), these updates extend the emission estimates from 2014 to 2017
and improve the overall agreement between CEDS and two widely used global
bottom-up emission inventories. The CEDSGBD-MAPS inventory provides the
most contemporary global emission estimates to date for these key
atmospheric pollutants and is the first to provide global estimates for
these species as a function of multiple fuel types and source
sectors. Dominant sources of global NOx and SO2 emissions in 2017
include the combustion of oil, gas, and coal in the energy and industry
sectors as well as on-road transportation and international shipping for
NOx. Dominant sources of global CO emissions in 2017 include on-road
transportation and residential biofuel combustion. Dominant global sources
of carbonaceous aerosol in 2017 include residential biofuel combustion,
on-road transportation (BC only), and emissions from the waste
sector. Global emissions of NOx, SO2, CO, BC, and OC all peak in
2012 or earlier, with more recent emission reductions driven by large
changes in emissions from China, North America, and Europe. In contrast,
global emissions of NH3 and NMVOCs continuously increase between 1970
and 2017, with agriculture as a major source of global NH3
emissions and solvent use, energy, residential, and the on-road transport
sectors as major sources of global NMVOCs. Due to similar development
methods and underlying datasets, the CEDSGBD-MAPS emissions are
expected to have consistent sources of uncertainty as other bottom-up
inventories. The CEDSGBD-MAPS source
code is publicly available online through GitHub:
https://github.com/emcduffie/CEDS/tree/CEDS_GBD-MAPS (last access: 1 December 2020). The
CEDSGBD-MAPS emission inventory dataset (both annual country-total and
monthly global gridded files) is publicly available under https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3754964
(McDuffie et al., 2020c).