Assessing the Impacts of Aircraft Emissions on Air Quality in a Megacity Using High-Resolution Flight Tracking Data

Air transportation plays a vital role in promoting economic development and regional connectivity yet the adverse impact of aircraft emissions on urban air quality has been greatly overlooked. Here, focusing on Shenzhen Bao'an International Airport, the third largest airport in China in terms of passenger capacity, we utilized automatic dependent surveillance-broadcast data to establish high-resolution emission inventories for aircraft landing-takeoff cycles and climb, cruise, and descent (CCD) cycles and employed four-level nested regional air quality modeling setup to assess the aircraft emission impacts on air quality in the surrounding area at a 1-km horizontal resolution. Among conventional pollutants, the most substantial impacts were observed for NO₂ and O₃ concentrations where aircraft emissions contributed 1.6–4.2 μg·m⁻³ to surface-level NO₂ concentrations and −1.1–−3.7 μg·m⁻³ to O₃ within 10-km with maximum contributions reaching 45 μg·m⁻³ for NO₂ and −37 μg·m⁻³ for O₃. Airport emissions exacerbate NO_X saturation leading to a decrease in surrounding O₃ concentrations. These results underscore the critical need for strategies to mitigate negative impacts of large point sources on air quality within urban settings.