Impact of finer grid resolution on the spatial distribution of vehicle emissions inventories

The ability to model air quality dispersion at increasingly smaller resolutions requires a concomitant improvement in the resolution of the gridded mobile source emissions used as input to these models. Two methods are currently used to allocate mobile emissions to grids; because of the limitations associated with these methods, their application is usually restricted to coarser grid resolutions. This paper uses a new mobile emissions inventory model (UCDrive) to explore the spatial distribution of mobile source emissions using finer grid cell resolutions. Our results indicate that the new model improves the precision of the spatial allocation of mobile source emissions, which in turn improves our ability to identify and implement pollutant control strategies.