Evaluation of aircraft emissions at London Heathrow Airport
Graphical abstract
Introduction
Heathrow Airport is the busiest two-runway airport in the world. In 2017, the airport handled over 78.0 million passengers and approximately 471,000 aircraft movements (https://www.heathrow.com/content/dam/heathrow/web/common/documents/company/investor/reports-and-presentations/financial-results/2017/2017-FY-Heathrow-SP-results-release.pdf). The airport is located in a complex environment: bounded by the M25 and M4 motorways on two sides, and by the outskirts of London on a third side.
The history of AQ measurements at Heathrow Airport, together with review of UFP at airports and the results of our UFP study at Heathrow Airport in 2016 are extensively discussed in Stacey (2019) and Stacey et al. (2020).
An increasing amount of research has been undertaken close to airports, to better understand the nature of ultrafine particles (UFP) emitted from aircraft. The literature review by Stacey (2019) collected the most relevant literature at the time into a single document. Prior research undertaken and referenced in this review, together with a research study of UFP measurements undertaken at Heathrow Airport in 2016 by Stacey et al. (2020), informs the direction of research and analysis throughout this paper. More recently studies by, for example Henry et al. (2019), Lopes et al. (2019), Bousiotis et al. (2019) and Rivas et al. (2020) have supported the work of others that UFP from airports and aircraft can be observed many kilometres downwind of an airport. Fushimi et al. (2019) found that a significant proportion of UFP measured at Narita Airport consisted of unburned jet lubrication oil.
Similarly, the impact of UFP on health has been increasingly studied in recent years. Bendtsten et al. (2019) reported that the UFP sampled at two airports in Denmark is comparable in toxicity to UFP from diesel exhaust. Habre et al. (2019) found observable health impacts in sensitive receptors downwind of Los Angeles International Airport (LAX), while Wing et al. (2020) also identified a link between exposure to aircraft-related UFP and pre-term birth in the region of LAX.
For the first time, a panel of experts (Cassee et al., White paper, 2019) has put forward a proposal to regulate exposure to concentrations of UFP. In terms of mitigation, both Cassee et al. (2019) and De Jesus et al. (2019) found that reducing emissions of PM2.5 was not likely to have any significant effect on measured concentrations of UFP.
The Stacey et al. (2020) study showed that UFP concentrations at Heathrow in 2016 were clearly influenced by aircraft activity and wind direction. The smallest particles were associated with winds from the airfield, and the particle size distribution of the airport-derived airmass was clearly different to typical urban roadside, urban background and rural distributions. The study focussed on ensuring comparability with the reference monitoring stations, which report measurements every three minutes. At this time resolution, it is not possible to use the data to identify individual aircraft, which depart or arrive on average every 90 s at Heathrow.
A follow-up campaign was therefore devised to measure UFP, and where possible the other pollutants at the monitoring station, at a faster time resolution to evaluate individual aircraft emissions and the relationships between aircraft, UFP and other pollutants. This paper builds on the 2016 report and presents the results of the 2017 study.
Section snippets
Monitoring location
This measurement campaign was designed to undertake rapid measurements of UFP and the conventional pollutants at Heathrow to further explore the local nature of these pollutants in the context of aircraft movements at the airport.
The network of air quality monitoring stations at Heathrow Airport is presented in Fig. 1:
Because of the dominant south-westerly nature of the winds in the UK, the LHR2 monitoring station is ideally positioned to measure aircraft exhaust plumes. This location was also
Overall summary
Timeseries data for the hourly measurements at LHR2 are presented in Fig. 2 below. One minute data for all pollutants are available in the DOI, and are presented graphically in Supplemental Information, Figure S1. Hourly averaged measurements of NOx, PM10, PM2.5 and BC are also accessible through the http://heathrowairwatch.org.uk webpages. The 1 min averaged data from these analysers will be used to explore associations and differences to typical ambient environments.
It can be seen from Fig. 2
Conclusions
An extensive campaign to monitor UFP at London Heathrow Airport was undertaken in the autumn of 2017. The primary objective was to examine high temporal resolution data to investigate the relationship between individual aircraft and measured concentrations of UFP, PM10, PM2.5, NOx and BC.
The SMPS analyser was specifically configured for fast response (1 min scans) and within a much smaller size range (6–100 nm particles) than in our 2016 campaign. This change in configuration caused a shift in
Data availability
Data supporting this publication are openly available from the UBIRA eData repository at https://doi.org/10.25500/00000535.
CRediT authorship contribution statement
Brian Stacey: Conceptualisation, Methodology, Software, Validation, Formal analysis, Investigation, Resources, Data curation, Writing - original draft, Writing - review & editing, Visualization, Project administration. Roy M. Harrison: Supervision, Writing - review & editing. Francis D. Pope: Supervision, Writing - review & editing.
Declaration of competing interest
The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.
Acknowledgements
The authors gratefully acknowledge Heathrow Airport Limited, UK for sponsoring this doctoral research project.
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2022, Environmental ResearchCitation Excerpt :Woody et al. (2011) found that aircraft emissions from 99 airports and below 3 km during LTO cycles in the U.S. contributed 3.2 ng/m3 or 0.05% of annual PM2.5 in 2005 based on Community Multiscale Air Quality modelling (CMAQ). In addition to aircraft engines that emit a variety of air pollutants (Stacey et al., 2021), other airport-related emissions include auxiliary power units (APUs), ground support equipment (GSE), road transport within the airport complex, also degrade local air quality (Hsu et al., 2014; Penn et al., 2015; Pirhadi et al., 2020), particularly on ambient NO2 and PM concentrations. Details can be found in Masiol and Harrison (2014), who systematically reviewed the air pollutants emitted from aircraft engine and other airport-related operations.
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also at: Department of Environmental Sciences/Center of Excellence in Environmental Studies, King Abdulaziz University, P.O. box80203, Jeddah, 21589, Saudi Arabia.