Over the past few months, the modelling team has extended the scope of its emission prediction capabilities to cover the whole of England, Scotland and Wales. The new model allows King’s to individually calculate emissions for all of the roads routinely surveyed by DfT. This covers a network of 17696 survey sites and equates to 50 342 km. Traffic emissions from smaller, less frequently surveyed roads are combined together in a km2 format.

The pollutants covered include: benzene, 1,3 Butadiene, CH4, CO, CO2, exhaust PM10, exhaust PM2.5, HC, N2O, NOX, NO2, PAH, SO2, tyre and break PM10 and tyre and brake PM2.5 and can be estimated for any given year, both future and past. Figure 1 illustrates the road traffic NOX emissions for the year 2009.

These UK emissions will assist the current research interests of staff at the MRC centre, which include the continued pursuit of research relating to air quality epidemiology; the investigation of trends in emissions and ambient air pollution measurements and also the current efforts of the modelling team to couple local street scale modelling with the regional scale, CMAQ model.

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Item date 22/07/2011