HTAP_v3 emission mosaic: a global effort to tackle air quality issues by quantifying global anthropogenic air pollutant sources

This study, performed under the umbrella of the Task Force on Hemispheric Transport of Air Pollution (TF-HTAP), responds to the need of the global and regional atmospheric modelling community of having a mosaic emission inventory of air pollutants that conforms to specific requirements: global coverage, long time series, spatially distributed emissions with high time resolution, and a high sectoral resolution. The mosaic approach of integrating official regional emission inventories based on locally reported data, with a global inventory based on a globally consistent methodology, allows modellers to perform simulations of a high scientific quality while also ensuring that the results remain relevant to policymakers. HTAP_v3, an ad-hoc global mosaic of anthropogenic inventories, has been developed by integrating official inventories over specific areas (North America, Europe, Asia including Japan and Korea) with the independent Emissions Database for Global Atmospheric Research (EDGAR) inventory for the remaining world regions. The results are spatially and temporally distributed emissions of SO2, NOx, CO, NMVOC, NH3, PM10, PM2.5, Black Carbon (BC), and Organic Carbon (OC), with a spatial resolution of 0.1 x 0.1 degree and time intervals of months and years covering the period 2000–2018 (DOI 10.5281/zenodo.7516361, https://edgar.jrc.ec.europa.eu/dataset_htap_v3). The emissions are further disaggregated to 16 anthropogenic emitting sectors. This paper describes the methodology applied to develop such an emission mosaic, reports on source allocation, differences among existing inventories, and best practices for the mosaic compilation. One of the key strengths of the HTAP_v3 emission mosaic is its temporal coverage, enabling the analysis of emission trends over the past two decades. The development of a global emission mosaic over such long time series represents a unique product for global air quality modelling and for better-informed policy making, reflecting the community effort expended by the TF-HTAP to disentangle the complexity of transboundary transport of air pollution.