Geographic sources of ozone air pollution and mortality burden in Europe.

Ground-level ozone (O) is a harmful air pollutant formed in the atmosphere by the interaction between sunlight and precursor gases. Exposure to current O levels in Europe is a major source of premature mortality from air pollution. However, mitigation actions have been mainly designed and implemented at the national and regional scales, lacking a comprehensive assessment of the geographic sources of O pollution and its associated health impacts.

Uncertainties in source allocation of carbonaceous aerosols in a Mediterranean region.

Understanding the atmospheric processes involving carbonaceous aerosols (CAs) is crucial for assessing air pollution impacts on human health and climate. The sources and formation mechanisms of CAs are not well understood, making it challenging to quantify impacts in models. Studies suggest residential wood combustion (RWC) and traffic significantly contribute to CAs in Europe's urban and rural areas.

Assessing ozone abatement scenarios in the framework of the Spanish ozone mitigation plan.

Tropospheric ozone (O) is a secondary air pollutant that affects human health, vegetation and climate, especially in Mediterranean countries such as Spain. In order to tackle this long-standing issue, the Spanish government recently started to design the Spanish O Mitigation Plan. To support this initiative and ultimately provide recommendations, we performed a first ambitious emission and air quality modeling exercise.

A new NMVOC speciated inventory for a reactivity-based approach to support ozone control strategies in Spain.

Ozone (O) pollution is a persistent problem in many regions of Spain, so understanding O precursor emissions and trends is essential to design effective control strategies. We estimated the impact of Non-Methane Volatile Organic Compounds (NMVOC) species upon O formation potential (OFP) using the maximum incremental reactivity approach. For this, we developed a speciated NMVOC emission inventory for Spain from 2010 to 2019 combining national reported emissions with state-of-the-art speciation profiles, which resulted in a database of emissions for over 900 individual NMVOC species and 153 individual sectors.

Differential impact of government lockdown policies on reducing air pollution levels and related mortality in Europe.

Previous studies have reported a decrease in air pollution levels following the enforcement of lockdown measures during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic. However, these investigations were mostly based on simple pre-post comparisons using past years as a reference and did not assess the role of different policy interventions. This study contributes to knowledge by quantifying the association between specific lockdown measures and the decrease in NO, O, PM, and PM levels across 47 European cities.