UrbEm - Urban Emission downscaling for air quality modeling

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.

40
mentions
9
contributors

What UrbEm - Urban Emission downscaling for air quality modeling can do for you

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).

Keywords
Programming languages
  • Python 91%
  • R 9%
License
</>Source code

Participating organisations

Helmholtz-Zentrum Hereon
National Observatory of Athens
Net

Reference papers

Mentions

Testimonials

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.
GEO Knowledge Hub
UrbEm: A GIS – based tool in service of high resolution air quality mapping
https://smurbs.eu/solutions/urbem/

Contributors

MK
Matthias Karl
Author
Helmholtz-Zentrum Geesthacht Zentrum für Materialforschung und Küstenforschung
OS
Orestis Speyer
Maintainer, Author
National Observatory of Athens
EG
Evangelos Gerasopoulos
Author
National Observatory of Athens
EA
Eleni Athanasopoulou
Author
National Observatory of Athens
AK
Anastasia Kakouri
Author/Developer/Maintainer
National Observatory of Athens
RT
Renske Timmermans
Author
TNO
HDvdG
MR
Author/Developer/Maintainer
Helmholtz-Zentrum Hereon

Helmholtz Program-oriented Funding IV

Research Field
Research Program
PoF Topic
2 Earth and Environment
2.1 The Changing Earth - Sustaining our Future
2.1.4 Coastal Transistion Zones under Natural and Human Pressure
  • 2 Earth and Environment
    • 2.1 The Changing Earth - Sustaining our Future
      • 2.1.4 Coastal Transistion Zones under Natural and Human Pressure

Related software

CiTYCHEM

CI

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.

Updated 5 days ago
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