Top-Down NOX Emissions of European Cities Based on the Downwind Plume of Modelled and Space-Borne Tropospheric NO2 Columns

Verstraeten, Willem W., Klaas Folkert Boersma, John Douros, Jason E. Williams, Henk Eskes, Fei Liu, Steffen Beirle, and Andy Delcloo

Top-down estimates of surface NOX emissions were derived for 23 European cities based on the downwind plume decay of tropospheric nitrogen dioxide (NO2) columns from the LOTOS-EUROS (Long Term Ozone Simulation-European Ozone Simulation) chemistry transport model (CTM) and from Ozone Monitoring Instrument (OMI) satellite retrievals, averaged for the summertime period (April–September) during 2013. Here we show that the top-down NOX emissions derived from LOTOS-EUROS for European urban areas agree well with the bottom-up NOX emissions from the MACC-III inventory data (R2 = 0.88) driving the CTM demonstrating the potential of this method. OMI top-down NOX emissions over the 23 European cities are generally lower compared with the MACC-III emissions and their correlation is slightly lower (R2 = 0.79). The uncertainty on the derived NO2 lifetimes and NOX emissions are on average ~55% for OMI and ~63% for LOTOS-EUROS data. The downwind NO2 plume method applied on both LOTOS-EUROS and OMI tropospheric NO2 columns allows to estimate NOX emissions from urban areas, demonstrating that this is a useful method for real-time updates of urban NOX emissions with reasonable accuracy.

Bibliographic data

Verstraeten, Willem W., Klaas Folkert Boersma, John Douros, Jason E. Williams, Henk Eskes, Fei Liu, Steffen Beirle, and Andy Delcloo. Top-Down NOX Emissions of European Cities Based on the Downwind Plume of Modelled and Space-Borne Tropospheric NO2 Columns
Journal: Sensors, Volume: 18, no. 9: 2893, Year: 2018, doi: https://doi.org/10.3390/s18092893