A new tool for processing atmospheric emission inventories: Technical aspects and application to the ESCOMPTE study area

Emission databases need to be processed for several purposes, e.g., policy and scientific, and so require flexible and fast handling. As a result, the creation and use of convenient interactive tools allowing easy and fast processing are of high importance. In this paper, a new software devoted to emission inventories processing is presented and applied to the actualization of the ESCOMPTE inventory. The ESCOMPTE inventory is a yearly (1999) high-resolution (1 km2) emission inventory created for use in chemical transport models to study ozone pollution. This tool includes several functions allowing the update of emission inventories at different temporal and spatial resolutions based on the reference ESCOMPTE inventory. The actualized yearly and hourly inventories are found consistent with the hypothesis involved in emission inventory creation. Due to its flexible architecture, several other applications related to air quality analysis can be performed such as the creation of emission scenarios allowing the evaluation of abatement strategies and regulation effects on anthropogenic emissions. Also, the architecture of the software allows an easy application to other emission inventories provided that they have similar or adaptable structure compared to the ESCOMPTE one.