UrbEm enables in a modular manner downscaling of gridded regional emissions with specific spatial proxies based on a variety of open access, robust, sustainable and frequently updated sources. UrbEm can be applied to any urban area in Europe and provides methodological homogeneity between cities.
Purpose
The use of regional emission inventories can be challenging for urban-scale AQ applications and air quality management in cities. Nevertheless, their exploitation through disaggregation by utilizing spatial proxies is a credible solution for European cities that lack bottom-up emission inventories.
To this end, we developed the UrbEm approach, which enables in a modular manner downscaling of gridded regional emissions with specific spatial proxies based on a variety of open access, robust, sustainable and frequently updated sources. UrbEm can be applied to any urban area in Europe and provides methodological homogeneity between different cities.
To demonstrate the general applicability and performance of the developed method and tool, we introduced the method, and compared the spatial distribution of uniformly disaggregated regional emissions with emissions downscaled with the UrbEm approach for the differing cities of Athens and Hamburg (https://www.mdpi.com/2073-4433/12/11/1404).
Access
The UrbEm downscaling approach is completely free of cost and open source. Its application is realized in (1) a series of R scripts and (2) as Pyhton script. Both applications rely on e.g. CAMS-REG emission inventories as well as a set (maps) of spatial proxies, which need to be downloaded before using UrbEm. UrbEm v1.0.0 can be accessed via GitHub (https://github.com/martinottopaul/UrbEm), while the required spatial datasets are published via Zenodo (https://zenodo.org/record/5508739).
The UrbEm approach facilitates the downscaling of gridded regional emissions, offering a solution for urban-scale air quality (AQ) applications and management. Developed to cater to European cities lacking bottom-up emission inventories, UrbEm provides a modular, open-source solution applicable to various urban areas.
UrbEm: A GIS – based tool in service of high resolution air quality mapping
The CiTYCHEM extension of the EPISODE dispersion model is designed for treating complex atmospheric chemistry in urban areas and improved representation of the near-field dispersion. Applications are urban air quality studies, environmental impact assessments and sector-specific emission studies.