Chinese industrial air pollution emissions based on the continuous emission monitoring systems network

As the world’s largest industrial producer, China has generated large amount of industrial atmospheric pollution, particularly for particulate matter (PM), SO(2) and NO(x) emissions. A nationwide, time-varying, and up-to-date air pollutant emission inventory by industrial sources has great significance to understanding industrial emission characteristics. Here, we present a nationwide database of industrial emissions named Chinese Industrial Emissions Database (CIED), using the real smokestack concentrations from China’s continuous emission monitoring systems (CEMS) network during 2015–2018 to enhance the estimation accuracy. This hourly, source-level CEMS data enables us to directly estimate industrial emission factors and absolute emissions, avoiding the use of many assumptions and indirect parameters that are common in existing research. The uncertainty analysis of CIED database shows that the uncertainty ranges are quite small, within ±7.2% for emission factors and ±4.0% for emissions, indicating the reliability of our estimates. This dataset provides specific information on smokestack concentrations, emissions factors, activity data and absolute emissions for China’s industrial emission sources, which can offer insights into associated scientific studies and future policymaking.