Ship Emission Inventories in Estuary of the Yangtze River Using Terrestrial AIS Data

Abstract

Estuary forms a transition zone between inland river and open sea. In China, the estuary of the Yangtze River plays a vital role in connecting the inland and oversea shipping, and witnesses heavy vessel traffic in the recent decades. Nowadays, more attentions have been directed to the issue of ship pollution in busy waterways. In order to investigate the ship emission inventory, this paper presents an Automatic Identification System(AIS) based method. AIS data is the realistic data of vessel traffic including dynamic information (position, speed, course, etc.) and static information (ship type, dimensions, name, etc.). According to ship dimensions, the power of engines is estimated for different ship types. By using AIS based bottom-up approach, ship emission inventories and shares of air pollutants and GHGs (Greenhouse gases) are developed. Spatial distribution of ship emissions is illustrated in the form of heat map. As a case study, the emission inventories are analyzed using AIS data of 2010 in the estuary, and following results are made:(1) shares of the emission are cruise ships 6.59%, bulk carriers 5.16%, container ships 52.96%, tankers 15.16%, fishing ships 9.16%, other ships 10.97%; (2) CO2 is the dominant part of the emission. (3) Areas of highest emission intensity are generally clustered around the South Channel, the North Channel and ports in the vicinity. The proposed method is promising because it is derived from the AIS data which contains not only real data of individual ship but also vessel traffic situation in the study area. It can server as a reference for other researchers and policy makers working in this field.