Quantifying the impact of aviation emissions on global nitrogen deposition

Abstract

Excessive nitrogen deposition from anthropogenic emissions has a global impact on natural biodiversity. While aviation emissions have been studied in the context of climate change and air quality, this is not true for nitrogen deposition. Meanwhile the growth of the aviation industry is likely to increase the relative contribution of aviation emissions to nitrogen deposition. Current regulatory policies aiming to mitigate nitrogen deposition are limited to local scale, and are inadequately applicable to the global nature of the aviation industry. In this research the impact of aviation emissions from both landing and take-off and non-landing and take-off emissions are studied by perturbing emission scenarios in the GEOS-Chem chemistry transport model for 2005. Results indicate that the aviation industry is responsible for 0.71% of total nitrogen deposition worldwide. While regionally contributing up to 30%, on average only 7.7% of aviation attributable nitrogen deposition is attributable to landing and take-off emissions globally , indicating that local regulatory policies do not take into account upwards of 70% of aviation attributable nitrogen deposition.