Nepal emission inventory – Part I: Technologies and combustion sources (NEEMI-Tech) for 2001–2016

Sadavarte, Pankaj; Rupakheti, Maheswar; Bhave, Prakash; Shakya, Kiran; Lawrence, Mark

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-19-12953-2019

Articles | Volume 19, issue 20

https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-19-12953-2019

© Author(s) 2019. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-19-12953-2019

© Author(s) 2019. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Articles | Volume 19, issue 20

Research article

|

18 Oct 2019

Research article |

| 18 Oct 2019

Nepal emission inventory – Part I: Technologies and combustion sources (NEEMI-Tech) for 2001–2016

Pankaj Sadavarte, Maheswar Rupakheti, Prakash Bhave, Kiran Shakya, and Mark Lawrence

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Final revised paper (published on 18 Oct 2019)
Supplement to the final revised paper
Preprint (discussion started on 08 Mar 2019)
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Interactive discussion

Status: closed

AC: Author comment | RC: Referee comment | SC: Short comment | EC: Editor comment

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RC1: 'Review', Anonymous Referee #1, 30 Apr 2019
- AC1: 'authors comment to rc1', Pankaj Sadavarte, 12 Jul 2019
RC2: 'Review', Anonymous Referee #2, 08 May 2019
- AC2: 'authors response to rc2', Pankaj Sadavarte, 12 Jul 2019

Peer-review completion

AR: Author's response | RR: Referee report | ED: Editor decision

AR by Pankaj Sadavarte on behalf of the Authors (24 Jul 2019) Author's response Manuscript

ED: Referee Nomination & Report Request started (26 Jul 2019) by Jason West

RR by Anonymous Referee #2 (07 Aug 2019)

RR by Anonymous Referee #1 (18 Aug 2019)

Suggestions for revision or reasons for rejection

I principally welcome the decision about developing two papers and clearly defining the scope of Part I and II. Personally, I’d probably choose a strategy to split the parts by addressing different pollutants since including open burning of agricultural residue and soil NOx would allow to have a complete national inventory of anthropogenic emissions for PM2.5, BC, OC, SO2, NOx, CO, and CO2 while CH4, N2O, NMVOC with large share of fugitive emissions, agriculture (possibly extended with biogenic emissions) would create Part II but also have complete coverage of sources (the combustion bits are done already and could be covered there). The advantage of that would be that for key air pollutants part I would give a complete picture of anthropogenic emissions and the whole discussion of shares/importance of particular sources that is now included in the paper could be compared easily to other work where total national emissions are presented, etc.
Still, the most important thing is to be clear about the coverage of sources and if the authors decide to go with such allocation of sources between part I and II, then I would suggest that Part II includes somewhere a summary of both Part I and Part II, i.e, national totals.

I’d like to thank the authors for responding to all the comments and considering several of them directly in the new revised version of the paper.

For most, I find the newly manuscript well written and documented, in fact some of the parts are a bit long giving account of many details which could be moved to SI. Abstract needs further work and shortening, I think.

Here are few more specific comments:
TITLE: I would suggest to shorten the title a bit and remove the “technology-based” as this is the element that can be included in the keywords and so it could be: “Nepal Emission Inventory – I: A high resolution bottom up emission inventory of combustion sources (NEEMI-Tech) for 2001-2016” or even shorter “A high resolution Nepal emission inventory for 2001-2016: Part I - combustion sources”

ABSTRACT: I think the current abstract is too long and contains too many details. I think it shall address only key and not elements of the paper highlighting key results and possibly knowledge gaps. At the same time, it would be important to add one statement earlier in the abstract (e.g., around the 2nd sentence) that clearly defines the scope saying it is part I covering this and that. Part of the sentences like in line 5 after approach can be deleted, especially that I do not think the inventory is done for the purpose of understanding technologies or sectoral energy consumption. Also several statements in parenthesis (like the ones about machinery, non-renewability of biomass) can be also deleted. Suggest to simplify the part describing key sources from line 15 onwards. Somehow it is hard to see right away what are the key sources.

Page 10: line 2; reference to Baidaya and Borkenkleefeld…the proper name of the second author is Borken-Kleefeld

Page 10: line 22-24; here different technologies are listed and also info is given about number of different kilns. Table 1, however, lists only FCBTK. I think it might be reasonable to add all of them to table 1.

Page 18, line 22-26 and section 3.2 as well as other sections where reference to ‘national’ emissions are made; I think it would be useful to repeat few times that the presented shares refer to the combustion emissions only and not the total – just a reminder to the reader that these are not necessarily national totals.

Section 3.4.1: In a number of places the authors refer to the argument that some differneces are there due to the difference or assumption about the sulfur retention in ash. It is not clear to me if this refers to the NEPAL inventory or the inventories which are compared like CMIP6 or EDGAR or GAINS-ECLIPSE?

Page 23: line 15; I think the authors need to be more precise when they refer to the “non-renewability factor” they should explain the term, its relevance and the assumption made with respect how much of the biomass is considered non-renewable and how it affects CO2 calculation presented in the paper.

Page 25: line 12-14: As I mentioned earlier, the CMIP6 and NEI inventory might differ in source coverage and for example her the NOx from soils (agriculture) could be one of these differences. I think this can be eliminated (and shall be) for the comparison as the CEDS/CMIP6 inventory data is explicit about this particular source and so it can be subtracted for comparison.

Page 46: Figure 7 and respective text in the paper; It might be useful to add in the text a word or two about potential issues of not full compatibility of sectoral structures of different inventories and the NEPAL inventory, i.e., a source of uncertainty in the comparisons that will be different from pollutant to pollutant but in a way is unavoidable. Additionally, I am not sure if the authors used the gridded data sets to estimate the numbers from global inventories or reached out to the authors or the web sites where respective sectoral data is available. I think it would be good to say explicitly and maybe even add the web links.

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ED: Publish subject to minor revisions (review by editor) (22 Aug 2019) by Jason West

AR by Pankaj Sadavarte on behalf of the Authors (01 Sep 2019) Author's response Manuscript

ED: Publish as is (06 Sep 2019) by Jason West

AR by Pankaj Sadavarte on behalf of the Authors (13 Sep 2019) Manuscript

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Short summary

Emission inventory studies are an important regulatory tool for quantifying the amount of pollutants released in the atmosphere using the fuel consumption and emission rates for different fuels. This study developed an emission inventory over Nepal for 2001–2016 that reveals the changing fuel consumption and subsequently the pollution across different sectors of industrial, transport, agricultural, commercial and residential uses with the use of spatial distribution of anthropogenic activities.