Environmental software systems for emission inventories

Atmospheric emission inventories are important tools for environmental decision making. The need to include transparency and reproducibility in emission calculation also fostered the development of environmental software systems for emission inventories. In general such software systems are organized as databases which contain as much emission related information as is available. For our own concept we introduce a layer of emission information as interim results, which we store as specific tables. While this structure is needed for allowing computations at an acceptable response time, we also use it to differentiate detail levels between a user’s sphere and an expert’s sphere. In the user’s sphere we expect any user to adapt evaluation algorithms without the need to know about limitations in emission calculations. Still also the expert’s sphere is openly accessible, allowing for full transparency of the calculation procedures. Considering uncertainty of input data and the impossibility to perform full validation, much of the information contained in an inventory will not contribute to improve the results in terms of emissions. Still we value this information as a contribution to an expert system, which may become crucial at a different application of the inventory. Emission inventory systems generally contribute to comparability between data from diverse inputs, especially as they are able to support error-checking procedures, an important task due to the large number of data providers.