Development and Implementation of an Air Quality

DEVELOPMENT AND IMPLEMENTATION OF AN AIR QUALITY INTEGRATED ASSESSMENT MODELLING SYSTEM FOR THE IBERIAN PENINSULA presented in June, 2015 Escuela Técnica Superior de Ingenieros Industriales Chemical Engineering and Environment Department Environmental Modelling Laboratory Universidad Politécnica de Madrid for obtaining the Doctorate in Chemical Engineering by Michel Vedrenne supervised by: Prof. Rafael Borge García, PhD - supervisor Prof. Julio Lumbreras Martín, PhD - supervisor Madrid, Spain, 2015 La salud del mundo está hecha un asco. “Somos todos responsables”, claman las voces de la alarma universal, y la generalización absuelve: si somos todos responsables, nadie es. —Las cinco frases que hacen crecer la nariz de Pinocho Eduardo Galeano A mis queridos padres. Acknowledgements When the construction and development of AERIS was first offered to me back in 2011, it sounded totally unappealing. After three years of intense work the model is now ready and available, and this would not have been possible without the help of many people that partici- pated directly or indirectly: I would like to say “thank you” to all of them. The first person that believed in my capability to make this model a reality was Dr. Rafael Borge, whose previous tenacious work provided me with a fully-operative air quality model and who opened me for three whole years the doors of his laboratory. Professionally and personally I owe him a lot, so I hope this dissertation constitutes a decent recognition to his work. I would also like to thank Dr. Julio Lumbreras for his experience, know - how, advice and orientation since the early stages of this work. Without his participation in AERIS, this doctoral dissertation would not have been ready by now. I am also very grateful for the trust, the compromise and the motivation that Dr. María Encarnación Rodríguez placed in my work, as well as the new knowledge fields she opened for me. In the current economic situation, the three professors provided me with full and constant economic support. I want to extend a special “thank you” to my work colleagues at the Environmental Modeling Laboratory of the Technical University of Madrid: David de la Paz, Juan Manuel de Andrés and Javier Pérez. Their help, advice and company made my work a lot easier. I also thank Dr. Adolfo Narros for his help and diligence regarding the administrative aspects of the dissertation, as well as Katerina Foteinopoulou and Nikos Karagiannis for their company and friendship. The creation of AERIS would not have been possible without the effort of many people that I have not personally met. I am especially grateful with the Mitigation of Air Pollution and Greehnouse Gases program of the International Institute of Applied Systems (IIASA), whose reports on the methodology of GAINS greatly allowed me to extend the modules of AERIS under my own perspective. I also acknowledge the United States Environmental Protection Agency that supports and makes available the CMAQ modeling system through the Commu- nity Modeling and Analysis System (CMAS); the Spanish and Portuguese Ministries of the Environment and EMEP for making available the emission datasets and monitoring data used throughout this work; Dr. Maximilian Posch and Dr. Jean Paul Hettelingh of the Coordi- nation Centre for Effects for providing the VSD model for estimating critical loads on soils; Dr. Panos Panagos for making available the SPADE and MEUSIS databases on European soils; Dr. v Acknowledgements Chad Monfreda of the University of Minessota for providing the shapefiles with crop covers and yields; Dr. John Douros of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki for his advice; Dr. Niko Karvosenoja of the Finnish Environment Institute and Dr. Rob Maas of RIVM for their fruitful contributions to the thesis; and Dr. Marialuisa Volta of the University of Brescia for making the documentation of the Opera and APPRAISAL projects publicly available. I am especially grateful with CONACyT (Mexico), which partially funded my doctoral dissertation. On a more personal perspective, I would like to express my gratitude to my friends Rubén Vásquez and Margarita Hernández for being the persons who initiated me into research and who encouraged me to follow postgraduate studies. Naturally the help and support that my family provided was essential for me to carry on with my career. I would like to thank my parents, Michel Gérard and Patricia for their unconditional support, love and empathy and for understanding my success as their own. Finally, I would like to thank Stephanie for her love, acceptance, support and sense of humor, but above all, for being there. Madrid, Spain - January 9th, 2014 M. V. vi Abstract Improving air quality is an eminently inter-disciplinary task. The wide variety of sciences and stakeholders that are involved call for having simple yet fully-integrated and reliable evaluation tools available. Integrated Assessment Modeling has proved to be a suitable solution for the description of air pollution systems due to the fact that it considers each of the involved stages: emissions, atmospheric chemistry, dispersion, environmental impacts and abatement potentials. Some integrated assessment models are available at European scale that cover each of the before mentioned stages, being the Greenhouse Gas and Air Pollution Interac- tions and Synergies (GAINS) model the most recognized and widely-used within a European policy-making context. However, addressing air quality at the national/regional scale under an integrated assessment framework is desirable. To do so, European-scale models do not provide enough spatial resolution or detail in their ancillary data sources, mainly emission inventories and local meteorology patterns as well as associated results. The objective of this dissertation is to present the developments in the design and applica- tion of an Integrated Assessment Model especially conceived for Spain and Portugal. The Atmospheric Evaluation and Research Integrated system for Spain (AERIS) is able to quantify concentration profiles for several pollutants (NO2, SO2, PM10, PM2.5, NH3 and O3), the atmospheric deposition of sulfur and nitrogen species and their related impacts on crops, vegetation, ecosystems and health as a response to percentual changes in the emissions of relevant sectors. The current version of AERIS considers 20 emission sectors, either corre- sponding to individual SNAP sectors or macrosectors, whose contribution to air quality levels, deposition and impacts have been modeled through the use of source-receptor matrices (SRMs). These matrices are proportionality constants that relate emission changes with differ- ent air quality indicators and have been derived through statistical parameterizations of an air quality modeling system (AQM). For the concrete case of AERIS, its parent AQM relied on the WRF model for meteorology and on the CMAQ model for atmospheric chemical processes. The quantification of atmospheric deposition, impacts on ecosystems, crops, vegetation and human health has been carried out following the standard methodologies established under international negotiation frameworks such as CLRTAP.The programming structure is MATLAB ® -based, allowing great compatibility with typical software such as Microsoft Excel ® or ArcGIS ® vii Acknowledgements Regarding air quality levels, AERIS is able to provide mean annual and mean monthly concentration values, as well as the indicators established in Directive 2008/50/EC, namely the th th th 19 highest hourly value for NO2, the 25 highest daily value and the 4 highest hourly th th value for SO2, the 36 highest daily value of PM10, the 26 highest maximum 8-hour daily value, SOMO35 and AOT40 for O3. Regarding atmospheric deposition, the annual accumu- lated deposition per unit of area of species of oxidized and reduced nitrogen as well as sulfur can be estimated. When relating the before mentioned values with specific characteristics of the modeling domain such as land use, forest and crops covers, population counts and epidemiological studies, a wide array of impacts can be calculated. When focusing on impacts on ecosystems and soils, AERIS is able to estimate critical load exceedances and accumu- lated average exceedances for nitrogen and sulfur species. Damage on forests is estimated as an exceedance of established critical levels of NO2 and SO2. Additionally, AERIS is able to quantify damage caused by O3 and SO2 on grapes, maize, potato, rice, sunflower, tobacco, tomato, watermelon and wheat. Impacts on human health are modeled as a consequence of exposure to PM2.5 and O3 and quantified as losses in statistical life expectancy and premature mortality indicators. The accuracy of the IAM has been tested by statistically contrasting the obtained results with those yielded by the conventional AQM, exhibiting in most cases a good agreement level. Due to the fact that impacts cannot be directly produced by the AQM, a credibility analysis was carried out for the outputs of AERIS for a given emission scenario by comparing them through probability tests against the performance of GAINS for the same scenario. This analysis revealed a good correspondence in the mean behavior and the probabilistic distributions of the datasets. The verification tests that were applied to AERIS suggest that results are consistent enough to be credited as reasonable and realistic. In conclusion, the main reason that motivated the creation of this model was to produce a reliable yet simple screening tool that would provide

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