Source emission and attribution of a large airport in Central China

Large airport operation release harmful air pollutants and have adverse impact on local air quality. As one of the world's top 30 busiest airports, Xinzheng International Airport (CGO) located in Zhengzhou City, China, its emission impacts needs particular attention. To identify the possible impacts and quantify the contribution of CGO airport to air pollution, a comprehensive approach including emission inventory, continuous monitoring, coupled with statistical modelling was adopted in this study. We estimated a more detailed emissions inventory for CGO, including hourly and annual emissions from engines and auxiliary power units of aircrafts during landing and take-off flight, and airside ground support equipment (GSE) in 2019. The results indicate that almost all the CGO specific parameters including operating hours, fuel consumption and unit LTO emissions at different modes were lower than ICAO reference values. The annual total emissions of NO_x, CO, HC, SO₂ and PM from CGO from aircrafts and GSE were 1207.7, 921.3, 123.7, 268.3 and 36.2 tons, respectively. In addition to SO₂, the main engines of the aircraft accounted for 80.3%, 62.6%, 45.5% and 74.3% of the total emissions, respectively. Meanwhile, a continuous monitoring campaign was conducted for one year in the vicinity of CGO airport. The monitoring data were analyzed using generalized additive model (GAM) to quantify the impact of NO_x emissions from airport activities on air quality at CGO. The results showed that even the influence of environmental and meteorological variables was greater, nearly 13% of the ambient NO_x concentrations were explained by emissions from airport activities, indicating the importance of airport-related emissions as the major source affecting local air quality.