Trends in anthropogenic emissions from 1960 to 2015

Different research teams worked during the past years to develop anthropogenic spatial and temporal distributions for different periods and regions. These inventories provide emissions either on a national basis for different countries, or gridded emissions at the global or regional scale. We will present an evaluation of the most recent emissions datasets providing emissions for the 1960-2013 period, for different gaseous and particulate compounds, i.e. carbon monoxide, nitrogen oxides, volatile organic compounds, sulfur dioxide, ammonia, black and organic carbon, and particulate matter (PM10 and PM2.5). We will discuss the consistency between global and regional inventories, as well as between the different chemical compounds, for 26 world regions. This work will help quantifying the uncertainties on anthropogenic emissions in the different regions. The simulations performed in support of the 2013 report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) used surface emissions from the Representative Concentration Pathways (RCPs) future scenarios. These scenarios provide emissions of greenhouse gases and atmospheric pollutants from 2005 to 2100. We will compare the emissions provided by the four RCPs emissions scenarios from 2000 to 2015 with the most recent information on emissions during the past fifteen years. From these comparisons, we will assess if the RCPs emissions can be used for forecasting the distribution of atmospheric pollutants in the recent past and near future. This assessment, which focuses on the emissions of nitrogen oxides, carbon monoxide, sulfur dioxide, volatile organic compounds, ammonia and particulate matter, includes estimations of emissions using inverse modeling techniques and satellite observations.