GAW Report No. 205 - IGAC Project

CHAPTER 7 – OVERVIEW OF INTERNATIONAL COLLABORATIVE RESEARCH ACTIVITIESAgain, except in Brazil, material and human resources for global change research in SouthAmerica on a country-by-country basis are far too small to allow a significant contribution tointernational programmes and to produce sustained impacts on local development. Nevertheless,global change science cannot be approached solely from a global perspective. On the contrary,turning points are to be found and faced locally. To illustrate this, let’s consider the apparentlysimple issue of conciliating local and global emission inventories. Today’s global chemistry-climatemodels that provide climate change scenarios are based on emission estimates for year 2000 andprojections, which are far from reflecting the actual development of large cities that were notrelevant for the year 2000. Local inventories are available for most cities in South America but haveyet to be included in the emission inventories used in global models. Is it a matter of not sharinginformation? Yes, to some extent due to too small an overlap of communities, something that isfortunately improving year by year, but also because it is non-trivial combining different scales in anon-linear system [Alonso et al., 2010].All in all, it is clear that there is a mutual benefit for scientists and policy makers in combiningefforts and exchanging perspectives, beyond short-term consultancies and perhaps creatingconsortia that provide a common but independent framework for sound science and policy making.It is also obvious that the understanding of global change requires global but more importantly localknowledge that is not feasible to obtain without the participation and leadership of local scientists.This in turn requires integration of local scientist into global programmes and investment in localcapabilities, both human and material. Following is a description of SAEMC/ADAPTE, whichdemonstrates what can be achieved in four years with less than 1 million dollars.Project description and highlightsMeasurement campaigns in Santiago, Bogotá, São Paulo, Lima and Buenos Aires wereperformed, which resulted in locally representative emission factors for vehicles, making it possibleto create the first consistent inventory for vehicular emissions for Buenos Aires [D’Angiola et al.,2010]. Also, tools were developed to obtain disaggregated emissions [Saide et al., 2009]. Past andfuture emission scenarios were completed for Argentina and have been initiated for other cities.Evaluation tools based on data assimilation techniques were developed and applied at the local andthe regional scales [Hoelzemann et al., 2009; Saide et al., 2011]. Reconciliation between global andlocal inventories was also achieved [Alonso et al., 2010]. All of these data have been reviewed andare becoming available for the whole community and are increasingly being integrated into globaldatabases.At the beginning of the project, there was a well-established regional transport modelespecially developed for addressing dispersion and impacts of biomass burning in tropical SouthAmerica [Freitas et al., 2005]. Regional weather services had some experience in numericalprediction for physical weather but none in chemical weather forecasting. Today, there is a fullycoupled model that provides operational chemical weather forecasting for South America [Freitas etal., 2009; Longo et al., 2009] and produces regionally relevant information for local applications.Also, both at the Chilean and Peruvian Weather Services, there are chemical weather forecastingtools available and operational as well as dedicated teams to run the models. Furthermore, thebasis for a community model is now feasible via the use of an already installed but veryunder-exploited high-speed Internet connection among South American countries and the rest ofthe world [D’Almeida et al., 2008].Existing air quality monitoring networks generally provide mass concentration for thedifferent cities. However, to address health and climate impacts, and even identifying emitters orany process understanding, one needs morphological and speciation information. This in turnrequires sophisticated instrumentation and analytical capabilities that are very expensive. For amarginal cost the project compiled and evaluated information on the chemical and physicalcharacterization of aerosols from Buenos Aires, São Paulo and Bogotá [Vasconcellos et al., 2011].This was made possible thanks to coordinated sampling and sharing of analytical resourcesincluding trace metals (Buenos Aires), organics (São Paulo) and ions (Bogotá). Local and specificstudies were also performed [Dos Santos et al., 2009].263