Author(s)

T. Pulles

Abstract

Emission Inventories are a basic tool in monitoring the progress of environmental policy. Detailed national inventories are prepared on a regular basis by parties to several international conventions and protocols (i.e. Climate Change UNFCCC, Long Range Transboundary Air Pollution UNECE LRTAP). This paper describes the specific quality requirements for this type of inventory, discusses the concepts of inventory validation and inventory verification and the general inventory compilation process applied by parties to meet with these quality requirements. Detailed inventories are also needed in a broad range of scientific applications, both in studies that are meant to support the different stages of the policy process (policy development, policy implementation and monitoring) and in studies that have a more general or fundamental scientific objective. The quality requirements for these types of inventory applications are different from the applications within the framework of the conventions and protocols. The paper concentrates on the possibilities and the challenges of using \“official” national inventory data, reported to international conventions in a more scientific environment, sets out a procedure to import \“official” inventory data into a scientific application and discusses possibilities to transform such data into a dataset that complies with the specific requirements of a scientific application. Finally a generalized database structure will be presented that allows the user to apply the resulting dataset in different types of studies, including atmospheric chemistry and transport models and retrospective and prospective what-if studies and scenarios. Keywords: inventory applications, policy oriented application, scientific application, validation, verification.

Keywords

inventory applications, policy oriented application, scientific application, validation, verification.