Top Vehicles are an under-recognized source of urban ammonia pollution

When emitted into the atmosphere, NH3 is converted into tiny particles of inorganic compounds, including ammonium sulfate and ammonium nitrate. On a national or global scale, most NH3 pollution comes from agricultural sources, such as livestock manure. But vehicles also contribute to the problem because their catalytic converters or selective catalytic reduction systems—which are designed to reduce emissions of nitrogen oxide (NOx) pollutants including NO2—have the undesirable side-effect of producing ammonia emissions. In cities, it's been hard to tell whether agriculture or traffic emits more NH3, and the default assumption has been that agriculture is the greater culprit, despite some labor-intensive measurement studies that suggested otherwise in a few cities. Daven K. Henze and colleagues wanted to see if satellite data could be used to answer this question for the first time from space, since such an approach, in principle, could be applied more broadly to urban areas throughout the world.

The researchers focused on western Los Angeles, where previous on-the-ground measurements found that vehicle emissions of NH3 were being underestimated. The team analyzed satellite readings of NH3, as well as NO2. Because the main source of NO2 in the region is on-road transportation, the compound can serve as a proxy for changes in traffic volume and an indicator of vehicular as opposed to agricultural ammonia emissions. The team correlated concentrations of the two pollutants, and also took meteorological effects into account, to calculate the amount of ammonia emissions that can be traced to vehicles. They found that vehicles accounted for 60% to 84% of total NH3 emissions at this urban location, consistent with estimates provided by modeling, but substantially higher than the 13% to 22% share estimated by government agencies. The researchers say their findings suggest the health impact of vehicle-related ammonia may rival that of NOx, yet it has been largely under-recognized and uncontrolled.

Compiling an emissions inventory is an important basis for ammonia control. Although there are some existing global or national emission inventories, they are not very applicable to regional-scale ammonia emission reduction policies due to the lack of specific regional information. Professor Weishou Shen's research group at Nanjing University of Information Science and Technology (NUIST) investigated ammonia emissions from agriculture in Jiangsu Province from 2000 to 2017 based on the emissions factor method, and the findings have been published in Atmospheric and Oceanic Science Letters.

"Jiangsu is where our research team is based, and it happens that this province ranks first in ammonia emissions from agriculture in key areas of national air pollution control in China," explains Shen. "We therefore feel it's our duty to investigate the characteristics and trend of change of ammonia emissions from agriculture here."

The team selected five regional representative nitrogen fertilizers and four typical livestock types and calculated their corresponding emission factors to investigate the characteristics and trends of agricultural ammonia emissions in Jiangsu from 2000 to 2017. They found that ammonia emissions from agriculture were mainly contributed by livestock and poultry farming (78.08%) and nitrogen fertilizer application (21.92%), and presented a fluctuating interannual trend during the study period.

"We suggest that ammonia emissions control from livestock and poultry farming should be a future focus of agricultural ammonia control," concludes Shen.