The impact of local fugitive particulate matter and emission inventories on air quality and health in dry and arid areas

The arid and semi-arid regions are facing a huge brunt of fugitive Particulate Matter (fPM) pollution, usually ascribed to the natural dust generated at the regional level (>100 km). In this study, the contribution of locally generated fPM to air pollution and it's environmental risk were assessed at a typical dry-arid area in the Middle East (i.e., State of Qatar, 200x200 km(2) domain) with the use of different emission and dispersion models. Four modelling scenarios were constructed to reflect standard practices (e.g., regional emission models and the World Health Organization's (WHO) Environmental Burden of Disease (EBD) method) and higher resolution calculations with emission models that were developed in past field campaigns. Emphasis was given to the effect on the WHO methodology beyond the typical emission estimates and ambient concentration levels. Eventually, the use of higher spatial resolution population and concentration data revealed fPM hot spots yielding up to 11.0 times higher short-term excess mortalities (an average increase of 1.8 times) compared to the baseline WHO methodology, where the whole population was exposed to a single average concentration. A difference that could be attributed to the improvement of the emission estimations for barren lands and traffic. For example, the estimated PM10 emission fluxes from barren lands, within the main metropolitan area, using the improved emissions model ranged from 0.05 to 42.0 mu g m(-2) s(-1), which is considerably higher than the emissions predicted using just the literature models (0.03 to 2.0 mu g m(-2) s(-1)). Overall, the barren lands emissions accounted for more than 90% of the fPM emissions during the study period. Consequently, this study is one of the first to quantify the significance of locally induced fPM and highlight the need for dedicated field studies and improved emissions estimation tools.