Development and Evaluation of a Comprehensive Atmospheric Emission Inventory for Air Quality Modeling in the Megacity of Bogotá

• Main Authors: Jorge E. Pachón, Boris Galvis, Oscar Lombana, Luis Gabriel Carmona, Sandra Fajardo, Alexander Rincón, Sandra Meneses, Rafael Chaparro, Robert Nedbor-Gross, Barron Henderson
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: MDPI AG 2018-02-01
• Series: Atmosphere
• Subjects: emissions; Bogotá; mobile sources; resuspended dust; air quality model
• Online Access: http://www.mdpi.com/2073-4433/9/2/49

We built an emission inventory (EI) for the megacity of Bogotá, Colombia for 2012, which for the first time augments traditional industrial and mobile sources by including commercial sources, biogenic sources, and resuspended dust. We characterized the methodologies for estimating each source annually, and allocated the sources to hourly and 1 km2 spatial resolution for use as inputs for air quality modeling purposes. A resuspended particulate matter (RPM) emission estimate was developed using the first measurements of road dust loadings and silt content for the city. Results show that mobile sources dominate emissions of CO2 (80%), CO (99%), VOC (68%), NOx (95%), and SO2 (85%). However, the newly estimated RPM comprises 90% of total PM10 emissions, which are at least onefold larger than the PM10 emissions from combustion processes. The 2012 EI was implemented in a chemical transport model (CTM) in order to understand the pollutants’ fate and transport. Model evaluation was conducted against observations from the city’s air quality monitoring network in two different periods. Modeling results for O3 concentrations showed a good agreement, with mean fractional bias (MFB) of +11%, and a mean fractional error (MFE) of +35% with observations, but simulated PM10 concentrations were strongly biased high (MFB +57%, MFE +68%), which was likely due to RPM emissions being overestimated. NOx, CO, and SO2 were also biased high by the model, which was probably due to emissions not reflecting current fleet conditions. Future work aims to revise emission factors for mobile sources, which are the main sources of pollutants to the atmosphere.