India – Emissions Inventory


A prerequisite to a good air quality model is a well understood emissions inventory – spatially and temporally, accounting for all the known anthropogenic sources and the non-anthropogenic sources. This is a challenging task that require customized approaches, as the critical pollutants, sources, meteorology, geography, population distribution, history, institutions, and information base vary significantly between regions and with in the region like India.

Click on the icons below, to access emission summaries for various sectors and brief background on the data fields available for that sector and the methodologies employed to process the necessary fields into emissions inventory. The inventory includes data on multiple pollutants from all known activities in the Indian Sub-continent. All the sectors and the sub-sectors are maintained on GIS platform, with a switch in the dispersion model to include or exclude their emissions, any or all of them, for any day or any hour of the modeling exercise. This allows us to dynamically track (or not track) the aggregate pollution to any of the sources in the model (for example, if we know in advance that buses are on strike, we can exclude their emissions for those days or hours). The non-anthropogenic sources such as biogenics, dust events, fires, sea salt, and lighting emissions are modeled at the Indian sub-continent scale. In other words, if there is a fire event or a dust event detected in the satellite retrievals, we will have it reflected in the calculations and shown as boundary intrusion. More details on each of these sources is below.

Road Transport Rail Transport Aviation Shipping
Cooking and Heating Lighting Open Waste Burning Fuel Stations
Biogenic Emissions Biomass Burning Lightning Wind Blown Dust
Industry Power Plants Road Dust Brick Kilns