EPFL - Vietnam: Asian Brown Cloud

• Unité de recherche: DDC
• Numéro de projet: 7F-03854.01

Mots-clé (Allemand)

Forschung
EPFL
Weiterbildung
Wissenschaft
Beziehungen
Ausland
Technologie

Description succincte (Anglais)

The ABC (Atmospheric Brown Cloud)-Vietnam Project (phase I) is a collaborative project between the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL) and the Institute of Environment and Resource (IER) at Ho Chi Minh City (HCMC). The project aims, on one hand, at improving the scientific understanding of the air pollution issues in the large cities in Asia. On the other hand, the project aims at initiating the training of Vietnamese scientists who could become key actors in the dialogues with decision makers and thus influence the policies, decisions and legislations that affect air pollution.
The scientific goals of the project are 1) to examine air quality for large cities in Asia by developing and conducting high resolution regional scale simulations and 2) to investigate in a quantitative manner the contribution of the Indochina Peninsula, and of the Asian continent in changing the global atmospheric composition. Both experimental and modelling tools will be used during the project. A measurement campaign will be organised to allow the development of accurate high-resolution inventories for traffic emissions. Numerical simulations will be performed with a mesoscale and a global chemical transport model to account for the variety of spatial scales associated with the air pollution processes.
Through these scientific activities, a strong collaboration will be established between EPFL and IER, which will permit to train students and scientists and to develop and extend the capacity of the participating Vietnamese institution.
SDC plans to support this programme for a duration of 6 years. For the first phase of 3 years (2005 - 2007) a total of 800.- kCHF is requested. The funding will cover two post-doctoral positions and a Ph.D. student for a 3-year period, a measurement campaign to be performed in HCMC, and the organisation by EPFL of a training course for scientist at IER.

Objectifs du projet (Anglais)

Within the general frame previously described, the scientific goals of the present project are :
"to examine air quality for large cities in Asia by developing and conducting high resolution local scale simulations;
"to investigate in a quantitative manner the contribution of the Indochina Peninsula, and of the Asian continent in changing the global atmospheric composition.
These goals will be achieved by answering the following specific scientific questions:
-What are the pathways that contribute to the export of pollution from the Indochina Peninsula?
-What is the fate of the exported pollution, in terms of dispersion and chemical evolution of the polluted plumes (including secondary trace gases and aerosol formation)?
-What are the relative contributions of fossil fuel versus biomass burning in the exported pollution?
What is the relative contribution of the different anthropogenic sources in the exported pollution, for example traffic versus industries from the main urban areas?
-To what extent do we know the emission inventories in that region of the world, in terms of both aerosols and trace gases?
-How atmospheric observations can be used to design and evaluate emission inventories of anthropogenic species for the Indochina Peninsula?

Résumé des résultats (Abstract) (Anglais)

The ABC project is an international research project initiated by UNEP. The project seeks to answer some of the major environmental issues facing the Asian Pacific Region in the coming decades in relation with climate change and the consequences of rising levels of air pollutants. Within the present project, new atmospheric observations will be provided and analysed to improve emission inventories and further used to evaluate a number of modelling tools. The present project will thus contribute to provide a better understanding of the major environmental issues which are at the core of the Asian Brown Cloud project, such as: how does air pollution from Asia affect the worldwide atmospheric composition ?
One of the ABC project's goals is to perform atmospheric measurement in large areas over Asia but the project also includes a strong modelling component. We will establish scientific collaborations with the institutions involved in the ABC project to perform, for example, comparisons between the various modelling tools developed at EPFL and those engaged in the UNEP-ABC project.

Mise en oeuvre et application (Anglais)

We are planning to use both a mesoscale air quality model and a global model of tropospheric chemistry and transport in combination with atmospheric observations from different instruments (e.g., city network, satellites) to tackle the scientific questions previously outlined. It is also planned to organize a measurement campaign in HCMC to allow the design and the evaluation of anthropogenic emission inventories.