The Air Emissions Inventory for the Greater Metropolitan Region in NSW, released by the NSW Premier today, was largely developed through the efforts of Pacific Air & Environment (PAE) under contract to the Department of Environment and Climate Change (DECC).
The Inventory - the first for NSW since 1996 - is a detailed database of pollutants discharged into the atmospere and is vital for developing strategies and polices for improving air quality in the study region, an area of 57,330 km2 which includes the greater Sydney, Newcastle and Wollongong regions. The inventory includes detailed data on about 7,000 industrial facilities, as well as gridded data on mobile, commercial and domestic emission sources throughout the region. PAE was responsible for quantifying the emissions from industrial and commercial sources.
The Inventory was built using a powerful Emissions Data Management System (EDMS) designed by leading emissions estimation expert, Kelsey Bawden of PAE. The EDMS is a sophisticated feature of the Inventory and has set a new benchmark.
Work on the inventory started in 2004 and took nearly three years and 6,000 hours of effort from PAE to complete. The EDMS v.1.0 contains the emissions inventory data within a Microsoft Access 2003/SQL Server 2005 based software package. The system requires 2,000 GB of hard drive storage.
The Inventory is a substantial achievement and pushes the boundaries of what is possible with current computing technology, and reflects on PAE's expertise in this vital area.
|
)
