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QUANTIFY - Quantifying the Climate Impact of Global and European Transport Systems

Summary information

Funding:FP6 - Integrated Project
Total cost:12770000
Ec contribution:8390000
Start date:2005-03-01
End date:2010-02-28
Duration:60 months
Coordinator:Robert Sausen (robert.sausen@dlr.de)
Organisation:Deutsches Zentrum für Luft und Raumfahrt E.V. - Germany
Keywords:Transport systems; greenhouse gases
Project name:QUANTIFY - Quantifying the Climate Impact of Global and European Transport Systems
Project summary:Abstract
The main goal of QUANTIFY is to quantify the climate impact of global and European transport systems for the present situation and for several scenarios of future development. The climate impact of various transport modes (land surface, shipping, aviation) will be assessed, including those of long-lived greenhouse gases like CO2 and N2O, and in particular the effects of emissions of ozone precursors and particles, as well as of contrails and ship tracks. The project goal includes provision of forecasts and other policy-relevant advice, which will be supplied to governments and to international assessments of climate change and ozone depletion, such as the IPCC reports (Kyoto Protocol) and WMO-UNEP ozone assessments (Montreal Protocol). Using significantly improved transport emission inventories, better evaluated and hence more reliable models, these new forecasts in QUANTIFY will represent a considerable improvement of current predictions. Long time scales are involved in the transport system and its effects on climate: some transportation modes have long development and in-service times; some emissions have long residence times and thermal inertia of the climate system protracts possible effects. Yet the impact of shortlived species depends on location and time of the emissions. So several transport scenarios and potential mitigation options need to be assessed on a sound common basis to identify the most effective combination of short and long-term measures and to inform policymakers and industry. We aim to provide such guidance by focused field measurements, exploitation of existing data, a range of numerical models, and new policy-relevant metrics of climate change. To achieve the goal, several advances in our fundamental understanding of atmospheric processes will be required such as the mechanisms by which pollutants are transported from exhaust into the free atmosphere, the impact of pollutants on clouds and the role of absorbing aerosols.

Objectives
Long time scales are involved in the transport system and its effects on climate: some transportation modes have long development and in-service times; some emissions have long residence times and the thermal inertia of the climate system protracts possible effects. Thus, it is clear that potential mitigation procedures need to be assessed soon to provide policymakers and industry with adequate guidance for decisions. It is our aim to provide such guidance through the QUANTIFY Integrated Project, based on new focused field measurements, further exploitation of existing observations, and a range of chemical, radiative and coupled climate models. The central project goal of QUANTIFY is to quantify the climate impact of the global and European transport systems for the present situation and for different scenarios of future development. Our project goal requires the production of projections and other policy relevant advice, which will be supplied to governments and to international assessments of climate change and ozone depletion prepared in support of policy such as the IPCC reports (Kyoto protocol) and the WMOUNEP ozone assessments (Montreal Protocol). The forecasts will be built on models, which will be refined and improved in this project by exploitation of existing data for model testing and validation and by the provision of new data on fundamental processes. Using significantly improved transport emission inventories and more reliable models, our new forecasts will represent a considerable improvement on current predictions. The central project goal of QUANTIFY will be achieved through the following main objectives:
- To establish consistent inventories of (direct) emissions (greenhouse gases, particles, precursors of greenhouse gases and aerosols) from present day and past transport, separately for the different modes of transport.
- To generate transport (direct) emission inventories for scenarios of future development, which are consistent with the IPCC SRES scenarios.
- To determine the fate of emissions from shipping during dilution to regions of the size of global scale models, i.e. to scales in the range from 100 to 500 km.
- To develop parameterisations for “effective emission indices” linking local emissions (at the exhaust) to scales appropriate for use in global models for all modes of transport (aviation, shipping, land surface transport).
- To consistently calculate the global chemical impact of the different modes of transport, for present day conditions and several future scenarios.
- To determine regional structures in transport-induced perturbations of the chemical composition of the atmosphere, e.g. North-South contrast, tropics versus non-tropics, with emphasis on the UTLS region, where changes in the atmospheric composition have a particularly large radiative impact.
- To provide quantitative estimates of the impact of the different modes of transport on aerosols and clouds, in particular on cirrus (contrails and contrail-cirrus) and low marine clouds (ship tracks) in terms of, e.g. cloud cover and cloud optical properties. To test the hypothesis that anthropogenic aerosol causes the formation of additional cirrus clouds.
- To consistently determine the radiative forcing from transport-induced changes in atmospheric (and surface) parameters, including the separation of the contributions from different modes of transport, for present day transport and for several future scenarios.
- To determine the spatial and temporal patterns of transport-induced climate change and to search for specific fingerprints.
- To develop and evaluate policy relevant metrics that comprise all important impacts on climate and that take the particular characteristics of transport into account. To estimate the impact of potential transport related mitigation options on atmospheric composition and climate.
Project outputs:A consistent new set of transport emission inventories has been produced; the effect of these emissions on atmospheric composition and on clouds has been modelled, the results have been used to compute new estimates of the effect of all transport modes on climate; simplified climate models have been gauged with results from the more complete models and new metrics have been investigated.

The outcome of QUANTIFY informs the EU in developing its policy and its position in international climate conventions (as the Kyoto Protocol). Moreover, QUANTIFY informs the debate over potential emission reductions and mitigation strategies. Furthermore, results from QUANTIFY feed in to forthcoming IPCC Assessment Reports, and potentially further international assessment studies, thereby strengthening the European position. The results are also directly relevant to the European aviation, car and shipping industries as well as to a number of European and international agencies and programmes (e.g. ICAO, IMO, ACEA).

A list of project related publications is available at the project website.