Evaluation of Emissions for Forecasting and Reanalyses of Air Quality in Asia

International audienceDuring the past few years, severe air pollution episodes were recorded in China and other regions in Asia, and they are more and more frequent. In order to understand the origin and evolution of these events, it is necessary to have an accurate knowledge of the surface emissions of the compounds involved in air pollution. The spatial and temporal distributions of the emissions need to be determined, as well as their evolution over the past decades. This requires an accurate characterization of the direct emissions of air pollutants and their precursors at the local, regional and global scale. We will review the datasets providing anthropogenic emissions at the global scale and at the regional scale in Asia, for the 1970-2015 period. Emission inventories for several species, i.e. CO, NOx, SO2, NH3, BC and OC, PM10 and PM2.5 will be discussed and compared. The emissions of volatile organic compounds as well as of a few speciated species will also be included in the analysis, as well as emissions of CO, NOx and total VOCs optimized through inverse modeling techniques. An evaluation of total emissions for different countries and regions, as well as the spatial distribution of the emissions will be discussed