Understanding Emissions of Ammonia from Buildings and Application of Fertilizers: An Example from Poland

A Europe-wide dynamic ammonia (NH3) emissions model has been applied for one of the large agricultural countries in Europe, and its sensitivity on the distribution of emissions among different agricultural functions was analyzed by comparing with observed ammonia concentrations and by implementing all scenarios in a CTM model. The results suggest that the dynamic emission model is most sensitive to emission from animal manure, in particular how this is connected to national regulations. In contrast, the model is most robust with respect to emission from buildings and storage. To do this, we obtained activity information on agricultural operations at the sub-national level for Poland, information about infrastructure on storages and current regulations on manure practice from Polish authorities. The information was implemented in the existing emission model and was connected directly with the NWP calculations from the Weather Research and Forecasting model (WRF-ARW). The model was used to calculate four emission scenarios with high spatial (5 km x 5 km) and temporal resolution (3h) for the entire year 2010. In the four scenarios, we have compared the European-wide default model settings against: 1) a scenario that focuses on emission from agricultural buildings, 2) the existing emission method used in WRF-Chem in Poland, and 3) a scenario that takes into account Polish infrastructure and agricultural regulations. The ammonia emission was implemented into the chemical transport model FRAME and modelled ammonia concentrations was compared with measurements. The results suggest that the default setting in the dynamic model is an improvement compared to a non-dynamical emission profile. The results also show that further improvements can be obtained on the national scale by replacing the default information on manure practice with information that is connected with local practice and national regulations. Implementing a dynamical approach for simulation of ammonia emission is a viable objective for all CTM models that continue to use fixed emission profiles. Such models should handle ammonia emissions in a similar way to other climate dependent emissions (e.g. Biogenic Volatile Organic Compounds). Our results, compared with previous results from the DEHM and the GEOS-CHEM models, suggest that implementing dynamical approaches improves simulations in general even in areas with limited information about location of the agricultural fields, livestock and agricultural production methods such as Poland.