On the global scale the harmonization and improvement of emission inventories is imperative to get consolidated estimates on formation of global air pollution, and it's influence on human health and climate, and so on the benefit of future policies combating these air pollution aspects. The EDGAR- HTAP project compiled a global emission dataset with annual inventories for CH4, NMVOC, CO, SO2, NOx, NH3, PM10, PM2.5, BC and OC and covering the period 2000-2005 using, to the extent possible, official or scientific inventories at the national or regional scale that are likely to be acceptable for policy makers in each region of the world.
This compilation of different official inventories from EMEP, EPA for USA, GAINS for China and REAS was first gap-filled with global emission data of EDGARv4.1. The IPCC code, conform to UNFCCC's CRF, is used as key for harmonizing the data at sector level. Next, the resulting emissions by country and sector were allocated to a 0.1º x 0.1º grid consistently using the EDGARv4.1 proxy data.
The publicly available version EDGAR-HTAP_V1 covers the period 2000-2005 and all world countries with sector-specific totals for CH4, SO2, NOx, CO, NMVOC, NH3, PM10, PM2.5, BC, OC. It does not include Savannah Burning (IPCC - 4E) and diffusive sources such as pave and construction dust. This is a compilation of various inventories (UNFCCC, REAS, GAINS, EMEP, EPA) gridded and gapfilled with EDGAR4.1. The emission gridmaps (totals for each substance) were provided to AER and documented in the HTAP (2010) report, Ch 3 of Streets et al. (2010) and all these files (in total 6X10=60) are currently available via the CIERA webportal on http://ciera-air.org/services
Remaining known issues are in EDGAR-HTAP_V1 are related to the use of inconsistent and incomplete datasets, gridding using EDGAR4.1 proxy data, and inconsistencies in time-series. The development of an improved dataset EDGAR-HTAP_V2 is envisaged for 2012.
More info can be found on http://www.htap.org or in report "EDGAR-HTAP: a harmonized gridded air pollution emission dataset based on national inventories, G. Janssens-Maenhout et al. (2011)"