The shipping industry is one of the greatest sources of emissions of air pollution and greenhouse gases, and studying its effect on the environment, health and climate is therefore vital. Still, the understanding of emissions from this sector has been very poor. Shipair was developed by SMHI in collaboration with the Swedish Maritime Administration to improve on this.
Modeling of ship emissions
The module uses recent developments in the EDB module to describe ships as mobile point sources. In the model, positions and ship identification is collected via AIS (Automatic Identification System) and stored into an Airviro emission database. The collection process can be done either as a one-time load into Airviro or continuously via a stream.
For every ship, Shipair combines its collected positions with detailed data from a ship register, containing e.g. ship class, engine type, age and rpm, to calculate the fuel consumption and emissions at every given moment.
Filters
Using the detailed data of each ship, it is possible to limit the calculations to certain types of ships or routes (= the trip between each two ports). The calculations can e.g. be limited to only contain ships with Estonia as a destination, ships coming from Germany, ships cruising outside of port, or only fishing or cargo ships.
Applications
This module can be used to provide information to authorities and other decision makers via:
- Environmental impact studies for ports or regions.
- Comparisons of emission scenarios for ships, ports or regions.
- Refinement and/or verification of the methodology used for reporting emissions under international conventions.
- Improvement of indicators for regional or national environmental objectives.