Author(s)

SIMÃO SANTOS, DIOGO LOPES, SÍLVIA COELHO, MARIANA SIMÕES, JOÃO FIRMINO MACHADO, JOANA FERREIRA

Abstract

Air pollution remains an environmental and health problem in Europe due to deteriorating air quality and its impacts on citizens’ health. Consolidated knowledge on the impact of air pollutants, especially the unregulated ultrafine particles (UFP) and black carbon (BC) is lacking in many countries, including Portugal. The ongoing national project HEART aims to develop an integrated methodology to assess the health impacts of air pollution by employing air quality monitoring and numerical modelling for exposure assessment, followed by an epidemiological study using individual-level health data. In the first phase of the HEART project, a high spatial (< 1 km) and temporal-resolution (hourly) emission inventory for the main sources of primary UFP and BC – road transport – was obtained for Portugal. To this end, the methodology developed under the BigAir project (https://bigairplatform.web.ua.pt/) was updated, and a database of emission factors (EF) for each sector and unregulated pollutant was built through an extensive literature review to select the most suitable EF for the Portuguese context and the HEART case study. This paper presents the objectives and methods being developed and applied in HEART, the compiled EFs and results of computed gridded emissions. The analysed studies evidenced a high variability of EFs, due to differences in measurement methodologies, meteorological conditions and fleet composition, and show that heavy-duty diesel vehicles is the main source of those pollutants. The preliminary gridded emission maps, generated at high spatial and temporal resolution, highlight urban centres as the main contributors to road transport emissions. Future work will focus on extending the UFP and BC emission inventory to all sectors, to be used in air quality simulations.

Keywords

road transport, emission factors (EF), black carbon (BC), ultrafine particles (UFP)