18July2016

01Liuhuan1_Health and climate impacts of ocean-going vessels in East Asia.pdf

01_supplementary.pdf

Summary

This paper investigates the emissions from ocean-going vessels in East Asia and their impacts on health and climate. The study quantifies various pollutants emitted by these vessels and assesses their dispersion, concentration, and the resulting effects on air quality, public health, and climate change.

Previous research

  1. all global, lack regional study, global-scale studies, most use fuel-based approaches → less accuracy at the regional level due to systematic misallocation of marine fuels.
  2. used the same CO2 spatial distribution proxy for all pollutants
  3. limited shipping activity data in some areas, esp, Asia

Improvement

  1. provide an importing regional supplement to global shipping emission studies
  2. by high-quality AIS data and a ship technical specification database
  3. bottom-up method accounts for differences among pollutant distributions

Data Resources

  1. Emission Inventories: Data on the types and amounts of pollutants emitted by different classes of ocean-going vessels.

High-quality Automatic Identification System(AIS) data: enable the positioning of ship emissions with a high spatial resolution, and includes modelling of shipping emissions

The advantage of the time sequence is that if there are duplicate messages then the total duration time remains the same, and so the total emissions are not influenced.

To deal with the AIS interruption near the boundary, which usually causes extremely long time durations, two nested domains were used. At least a 360 km boundary distance from domain 1 to 2 was kept to ensure there are multiple AIS messages within this distance. The chosen region reflects our focus on densely populated areas, and does not represent any national boundaries.

The AIS was introduced by the IMO International Convention for the Safety of Life at Sea. The AIS has broad coverage of the fleet and detailed information, including position, speed, and information on the ship. Ships larger than 300 GT engaged in international voyages, cargo ships over 500 GT engaged in national voyages and all passenger ships are required to install AIS. AIS data includes some data fields that are useful for the analyses of vessel movement and activity, such as Maritime Mobile Service Identify (MMSI) code, vessel coordinate (longitude and latitude), vessel actual speed, and time information.