Quantification of the Emission Changes in Europe Due to the COVID-19 Quarantine Measures

Abstract:

To control the spread of the COVID-19 disease, European governments implemented emergency measures going from light social distancing to strict lockdowns, depending on the country. As a consequence, many industries, businesses and transport networks were forced to either close down or drastically reduce their activity, which resulted in an unprecedented drop of anthropogenic emissions. This work presents the Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service (CAMS) European regional emission reduction factors (ERF) associated to the COVID-19 lockdowns (CAMS-REG_ERF-COVID19), an open source dataset of daily-, sector- and country-dependent emission reduction factors for Europe linked to the COVID-19 restrictions. The resulting dataset covers a total of six emission sectors, including: road transport, energy industry, manufacturing industry, residential and commercial combustion, aviation and shipping. The time period covered by the dataset starts from 21 February, when the first European localised lockdown was implemented in the region of Lombardy (Italy), and is updated on a regular basis to provide the most recent information. The CAMS-REG_ERF-COVID19 dataset is based on a wide range of information sources and approaches, including open access and measured activity data and meteorological data, as well as the use of machine learning techniques. We combine the computed emission reduction factors with the Copernicus CAMS European gridded emission inventory to spatially and temporally quantify reductions in emissions from both criteria pollutants and greenhouse gases, as well as to assess the contribution of each pollutant sector and country to the overall reductions. The resulting gridded and time-resolved emission reductions are used to perform an air quality modelling study to evaluate its potential on reproducing observed air pollutant concentration changes in selected regions across Europe. Clear improvements of the modelled results are found when considering the emission reduction factors, with bias reductions in some regions of more than 90 %. A preliminary version of the CAMS-REG_ERF-COVID19 dataset can be found in https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-2020-686.