Short-Term Responses of Air Quality to Changes in Emissions under the Representative Concentration Pathway 4.5 Scenario over Brazil

• Main Authors: Daniel Schuch, Maria de Fatima Andrade, Yang Zhang, Edmilson Dias de Freitas, Michelle L. Bell
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: MDPI AG 2020-07-01
• Series: Atmosphere
• Subjects: air quality responses; atmospheric emissions; climate change; WRF-Chem
• Online Access: https://www.mdpi.com/2073-4433/11/8/799

Brazil, one of the world’s fastest-growing economies, is the fifth most populous country and is experiencing accelerated urbanization. This combination of factors causes an increase in urban population that is exposed to poor air quality, leading to public health burdens. In this work, the Weather Research and Forecasting Model with Chemistry is applied to simulate air quality over Brazil for a short time period under three future emission scenarios, including current legislation (CLE), mitigation scenario (MIT), and maximum feasible reduction (MFR) under the Representative Concentration Pathway 4.5 (RCP4.5), which is a climate change scenario under which radiative forcing of greenhouse gases (GHGs) reach 4.5 W m⁻² by 2100. The main objective of this study is to determine the sensitivity of the concentrations of ozone (O₃) and particulate matter with aerodynamic diameter 2.5 µm or less (PM_2.5) to changes in emissions under these emission scenarios and to determine the signal and spatial patterns of these changes for Brazil. The model is evaluated with observations and shows reasonably good agreement. The MFR scenario leads to a reduction of 3% and 75% for O₃ and PM_2.5 respectively, considering the average of grid cells within Brazil, whereas the CLE scenario leads to an increase of 1% and 11% for O₃ and PM_2.5 respectively, concentrated near urban centers. These results indicate that of the three emission control scenarios, the CLE leads to poor air quality, while the MFR scenario leads to the maximum improvement in air quality. To the best of our knowledge, this work is the first to investigate the responses of air quality to changes in emissions under these emission scenarios for Brazil. The results shed light on the linkage between changes of emissions and air quality.