Among human activities affecting air quality, maritime transport is widely considered a major source of air pollution in the world (Mueller et al., 2011). Numerous studies have recently demonstrated that near-surface pollutant concentrations (particularly NOx, PM and secondary pollutant O3) which are directly attributed to emissions from ships may be rather large and such a contribution needs to be accounted for in the assessment of air quality in port cities. The interest in the evaluation of pollutant concentration from maritime transport is also confirmed by the existence of a large number of European projects devoted to this subject. Among those, the European Territorial Cooperation Programme Greece-Italy 2007-2013 CESAPO (Contribution of Emission Sources on the Air Quality of the Port-cities in Greece and Italy - www.cesapo.upatras.gr) project gemmed from the necessity to fill gaps in the knowledge of the impact of maritime activities on air quality between the two countries. Here, we present some of the project findings and results obtained from a field campaign and numerical modelling for the assessment of both gaseous and particulate pollutants. The study area is the harbour of Brindisi (IT) which, with its traffic volume of over 2,000 ships/year, is one of the main ports in the south Adriatic coast of Italy. A ship emission inventory is built according to the MEET methodology (Trozzi and Vaccaro, 1998) on the basis of the knowledge of local maritime traffic volume and some specific parameters of the ships, such as engine type, time spent in port in the different phases, fuel consumption and gross tonnage. Ship data are available from the Avvisatore Marittimo (http://www.porto.br.it/bpi/index.php) of the Brindisi port and from MarineTraffic.com. Emission factors for the manoeuvring and hotelling phases are collected from the European Commission Report (2002). Starting from emissions, nitrogen oxides (NOx) and particulate matter (PM) concentrations are modelled using the meso-scale model BOLCHEM (Mircea et al., 2006) coupled (offline) with the micro-scale dispersion model ADMS-Urban. The mesoscale model is used to calculate background concentrations which are then fed into the micro-scale model. Numerical simulations are then evaluated using field data from both existing monitoring stations (managed by the Regional Agency for Environmental Protection (ARPA) Puglia) and a dedicated field campaign which took place in July - October 2012. The field campaign was performed by using a Mobile Laboratory which in addition to a 3D sonic anemometer and a number of standard meteorological instruments, was equipped with a Condensation Particle Counter (CPC-Grimm Aerosol 5.403, 1Hz, measurement range 10nm–1.0μm) and a video camera (AXIS 221) used to monitor departure/arrival of ships in the studied area. PM2.5 concentrations were measured with a fast-response (1Hz) optical detector pDR-1200 by Thermo Electron Corp (Donateo et al., 2006). Post-processing is performed on 30 and 60 minutes averages as well as daily averages. Results show that emissions from ships contribute largely to the total NOx concentration with a peak up to about 30-40% while the contribution to PM concentration is below 10%. The latter is confirmed by the estimation of the direct contribution to PM2.5 and number concentration of particles attributed to ship traffic and ship-related activities (loading/unloading of ships) following the approach developed by Contini et al. (2011). According to this method, the average relative contribution to PM2.5 mass concentration is about 7.5%. In conclusion, results based on Brindisi port, suggest that gaseous and particles emissions from shipping sources need to be carefully accounted for in the assessment of air quality in coastal/port cities.
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- European Commission Report, 2002. Quantification of emissions from ships associated with ship movements between ports in the European Community. Final Report.
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- Trozzi, C., Vaccaro, R., 1998. TECHNE report MEET RF98, Methodologies for estimating air pollutant emissions from ships, August 1998.
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