Urban emissions measured with aircraft

Detailed knowledge of the quantity and composition of urban emissions is a prerequisite for successful application of atmospheric models to predict transport and distribution of primary and secondary air pollutants in the troposphere. We investigate the prospects and limitations of aircraft measurements in the determination of emission fluxes from urban areas. Our analysis focuses on data collected in September 1994 in and around Athens, Greece. Generally, emission fluxes from cities can be quantified with aircraft and with the minimum acceptable precision (uncertainty better than a factor of 2) only under very favorable meteorological conditions, namely in a homogeneous flow field in a well-mixed boundary layer. Better accuracy can be achieved only through ensemble averaging of repeated measurements. From our measurements in the Athens area, we deduced relative emission ratios of pollutant gases. With the support of ground-based measurements in a street canyon, the emission ratios NOx/CO, SO2/CO, and volatile organic compounds/CO (34 individual VOCs) could be determined with high precision. These results are very useful in analyzing differences between various existing emission inventories. Our data for VOCs reveal that the non-traffic emissions are of the same magnitude as the emissions originating from traffic.