Tuesday 27 August 2013

CHEERS project: Chemical and Physical Properties and Source Apportionment of Airport Emissions in the context of European Air Quality Directives

The Project entitled ‘Chemical and Physical Properties and Source Apportionment of Airport Emissions in the context of European Air Quality Directives’, acronym ‘CHEERS’, is a project funded by the Seventh Framework Programme (FP7) of the European Community under the ‘People’ programme (Call: FP7-PEOPLE-2012-IEF).

The project arises from the lack of detailed and comprehensive information on the emissions of airport activities, especially for aircraft emissions. In facts, while knowledge of most anthropogenic sources of air pollution has recently rapidly increased and nowadays a significant number of studies was carried out for common anthropogenic sources (e.g., vehicular traffic, shipping, industrial), major weaknesses in knowledge of the emissions from airports and their impacts upon local and regional air quality still remain. This lack appears to be a major and worrying gap if considering the forecast future growth in the volume of air traffic which probably will lead to a significant increase in pollution levels generated by airports in the few forthcoming years.

Objective: While knowledge of anthropogenic sources of air pollution is increasing rapidly, there are major deficiencies in knowledge of the emissions of air pollutants from airports and their impacts upon air quality. Given the forecast future growth in the volume of air traffic, a significant increase of pollution levels generated by airports is probable. The main goals of the CHEERS project arise from the research needs associated with this source. The project focuses primarily upon (i) the determination of the impact of aircraft emissions upon particulate matter concentrations and size distributions used as an indicator of particle sources and formation mechanisms, and (ii) on the PM2.5 source apportionment to quantify the impact of aircraft, road traffic and other airport emissions upon local air quality. A field study will be carried out close to a runway at London Heathrow Airport which is recognised as a major source of air pollution and a location where EU air quality Limit Values are currently exceeded. Simultaneous deployment of fast-response instruments will allow a disaggregation of the contributions of different sources to PM, and analysis of particle size distributions will throw light on the atmospheric dispersion and processing of aircraft emissions. A concurrent PM2.5 sampling campaign will be carried out at two sites, one heavily impacted by aircraft emissions and the other representing the local background. Samples will be analysed chemically to give mass closure and to provide data on the concentrations of elemental, ionic and organic molecular marker constituents indicative of emission sources, allowing a molecular marker-based chemical mass balance study to quantify the contributions of the various sources of PM. Since air pollution problems associated with airports are common across the EU, this study will have implications far beyond the southern UK and will help in the design of air pollution mitigation strategies on both local and regional scales.

The results of CHEERS are therefore both of intense national interest in relation to the air pollution hotspot around major airports and of international interest in considerably enhancing the knowledge base on the contribution of aircraft and airport operations to air pollution problems. Scientific results of CHEERS will be presented to the scientific community through publications and conference presentations. In addition, main results will be trasmitted to UK government and European Commission. By engaging policy makers to the discussion, the use of science may help to underpin policy and the project results can contribute directly to the future path of both national and European policy towards the air pollution issues concerned with airport operations. However, it is also essential to present results directly to public opinion and this blog aims to disseminate the results of CHEERS through the web.

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