UrbEm - The Urban Emission downscaling model for air quality modeling

Description

Overview

Intra-urban air quality modeling is an integral tool for alleviating one of the most urgent environmental pressures cities face globally. According to the European Environment Agency, air pollution remains the largest environmental health risk in Europe. Exposure to fine particulate matter and nitrogen dioxide levels above the World Health Organization recommendations cause an estimated 253,000  and 52,000 premature deaths, respectively, in 2021. High resolution air quality modeling can offer key insights regarding air pollution hotspots, delineate major pollution sources and enable scenario analysis regarding mitigation measures. However, it necessitates inputs that are hard to come by, especially regarding the so called emission inventory which often acts as a deterrent for implementing such a modelling framework. Here, an agile solution for creating such an inventory is proposed, based on EU-wide available products provided by the Copernicus Services (Atmospheric, Climate, Emergency, Land Monitoring) developed in Python. 

UrbEm v2.0.0 builds upon the foundation of the UrbEm v1.0.0 Knowledge Package, enhancing the downscaling methodology for regional emission inventories in urban-scale air quality (AQ) applications across European cities without comprehensive bottom-up emission data. Through intuitive interfaces and automated processes, UrbEm v2.0.0 streamlines the mapping of industrial, residential, agricultural, and transport sources, ensuring methodological consistency and heightened precision.

Designed for versatility, UrbEm can be seamlessly applied to any urban area in Europe, promoting methodological uniformity across diverse cities. To showcase its expanded capabilities, we conducted comparative studies across 13 European cities (Kakouri et al., 2023).

The User Story is based on EIFFEL's project (https://www.eiffel4climate.eu/) implementation regarding the Urban Sustainability pilot in Athens, Greece, where GHG mitigation was transformed by UrBem into new emission inventories and consequent air quality fields, i.e. quantifying the air quality co-benefits of climate action.

Access

UrbEm v2.0.0 is freely accessible and open source, provided as Python scripts available for download via GitHub (Release UrbEm v2.0.0 · env13029/UrbEm · GitHub).

Funding

The authors acknowledge the funding received by the EIFFEL project (funded by the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under grant agreement No. 101003518).

User Stories

Elements of the Knowledge Package

Additional details