Atmospheric emission inventory of multiple pollutants from civil aviation in China: Temporal trend, spatial distribution characteristics and emission features analysis

Abstract A detailed comprehensive emission inventory of multiple air pollutants from civil aviation in China for the historical period of 1980–2015 is developed by using an approach of combining bottom-up with top-down for the first time. Annual emissions of various pollutants present a rapidly ascending trend along with the increase of economic volume and population, which are estimated at approximately 4.77 kt HC, 59.63 kt CO, 304.77 kt NO x , 59,961 kt CO 2 , 19.04 kt SO 2 , 3.32 kt PM 2.5 , 1.59 kt BC, 1.06 kt OC and 5.44 t heavy metals (HMs), respectively, by the year 2015. We estimate the local emissions in 208 domestic civil airports and allocate the total cruise emissions onto 299 main domestic flight segments with surrogate indexes, such as route distance, cargo and passenger turnover. The results demonstrate that emission intensities in central and eastern China are much higher than those in northeastern and western China, and these regions are characterized with high population density, huge economy volume, as well as transit convenience. Furthermore, we have explored emission characteristics of multiple pollutants under different operation modes in 2015. For PM 2.5 , SO 2 /CO 2 /HMs and NO x , the emissions from cruise process constitute the dominant contributor with a share of 89%, 92% and 81%, of the associated total emissions, respectively, comparing with 76% and 71% of the total CO and HC emissions release from Landing and Take-off (LTO) process. Consequently, there are notably different emission characteristics from different flight processes due to various combustion status of aviation fuel. In addition, we predict the future trends of multi-pollutants emissions from China's civil aviation industry through 2050 under three scenarios, and the results indicate that the reduction from the improvement of new technology or new national standards would be largely offset by the rise in multi-pollutants emissions from rapidly aviation fuel growth.