More into details, the emission dataset was obtained starting
from the national emission inventory, annually compiled for
fulfilment of UNECE CLRTAP international agreements, Directive
2008/50/CE and national legislation on air quality (ISPRA, 2009).
The emission inventory is available at NUTS3 level spatial distribution
(provinces), with reference to year 2005. NUTS3-provincial
emissions are then geo-referenced, by using spatial information
layers as proxy variables, depending on the emission sector: e.g.
domestic heating emissions are assigned to populated areas,
transport emissions are assigned to road networks, etc. Finally,
spatialized annual emissions are “gridded”, i.e. redistributed on a
spatially regular grid, and “modulated”, i.e. distributed on hourly
time steps, in order to feed the air quality model.
The analysis was performed on two regional domains at
4 4 km2 cell resolution on horizontal grid: Northern Italy (NI
domain) and Central Italy (CI domain). For the purpose of this
study, hourly gridded emissions and point emissions, available for
AMS-MINNI input, have been aggregated on the whole year and
along the vertical dimension, obtaining emission maps at ground
level with national coverage.