High resolution seasonal and decadal inventory of anthropic gas-phase and particle emissions for Argentina

Abstract

This work presents the integration of a gas-phase and particulate atmospheric emission inventory (AEI) for Argentina in high spatial resolution (0.025° × 0.025°; approx. 2.5 km × 2.5 km) considering monthly variability from 1995 to 2020. The new inventory, called GEAA-AEIv3.0M, includes the following activities: energy production, fugitive emissions from oil and gas production, industrial fuel consumption and production, transport -road, maritime and air-, agriculture, livestock production, manufacturing, residential, commercial and biomass + agricultural-waste burning. The following species, grouped by atmospheric reactivity, are considered: i) Greenhouse Gases (GHG): CO2, CH4 and N2O; ii) Ozone Precursors: CO, NOx (NO + NO2) and Non-Methane Volatile Organic Compounds (NMVOC); iii) Acidifying Gases: NH3 and SO2; and iv) Particulate Matter (PM): PM10, PM2.5, Total Suspended Particle (TSP) and Black-Carbon (BC). The main objective of the GEAA-AEIv3.0M high-resolution emission inventory is to provide temporal resolved emission maps to support air quality and climate modeling oriented to evaluate pollutant mitigation strategies by local governments. This is of major concern especially in countries where air quality monitoring networks are scarce, and the development of regional and seasonal emissions inventories would result in remarkable improvements in the time + space chemical prediction achieved by air quality models. Despite distinguishing among different sectoral and activity databases as well as introducing a novel spatial distribution approach based on census radii, our high-resolution GEAA-AEIv3.0M show equivalent national-wide total emissions compared to the Third National Communication of Argentina (TNCA), which compiles annual GHG emissions from 1990 through 2014 (agreement within ±4 %). However, the GEAA-AEIv3.0M includes acidifying gases and PM species not considered in TNCA. Spatial and temporal comparisons were also performed against EDGAR HTAPv5.0 inventory for several pollutants. The agreement was acceptable within less than 30 % for most of the pollutants and activities, although a > 90 % discrepancy was obtained for methane from fuel production and fugitive emissions and > 120 % for biomass burning. Finally, the updated seasonal series clearly showed the pollution reduction due to the COVID-19 lockdown during the first quarter of year 2020 with respect to same months in previous years. Through an open access data repository, we present the GEAA-AEIv3.0M inventory, as the largest and more detailed spatial resolution dataset for the Argentine Republic, which includes monthly gridded emissions for 12 species and 15 sectors between 1995 and 2020. The datasets are available at http://dx.doi.org/10.17632/d6xrhpmzdp.1, under a CC-BY 4 license (Puliafito et al., 2021).