Suchergebnisse

Each year, all Member States (MS) have to deliver their national emissions inventory to the European Union for all activity sectors, following the requirements of the CLRTAP programme. Recently, the specifications of this emissions report changed, MS emissions data had to be reported in grid cells with a resolution of 0.5° × 0.5°, and now, from 2015 forward, they must use a higher resolution grid (0.1° × 0.1°). The purpose of this study is to investigate the main differences found between these two emissions inventories for Europe, focusing on Portugal as a case study, using their available common year (2015). Differences on emissions values and their spatial distribution were analysed per sector and pollutant. Additionally, to evaluate and compare the accuracy of both datasets, air quality modelling simulations were performed, and the resulting pollutant concentrations were validated using data from observations. The results found indicated major differences in several MS (e.g. France, Italy, Germany and Spain). Portugal was not one of the delta hotspots but significant differences were still found, mainly for NOx emissions for the transport sectors, both emissions and concentrations in urban areas, as well as NO2 concentrations throughout the study domain. The analysis of the air quality modelling outputs indicates that the EMEP0.1 inventory does not improve model performance, which suggests that the methodology to build EMEP0.1 was not adequate. This work highlights the importance of accurately estimating emissions data and confirms what other studies already indicated regarding uncertainties: solely improving the emissions inventory resolution does not necessarily imply higher accuracy in the results. ; published

Although regulatory improvements for air quality in the European Union have been made, air pollution is still a pressing problem and, its impact on health, both mortality and morbidity, is a topic of intense research nowadays. The main goal of this work is to assess the impact of the exposure to air pollutants on the number of daily hospital admissions due to respiratory causes in 58 spatial locations of Portugal mainland, during the period 2005-2017. To this end, INteger Generalised AutoRegressive Conditional Heteroskedastic (INGARCH)-based models are extensively used. This family of models has proven to be very useful in the analysis of serially dependent count data. Such models include information on the past history of the time series, as well as the effect of external covariates. In particular, daily hospitalisation counts, air quality and temperature data are endowed within INGARCH models of optimal orders, where the automatic inclusion of the most significant covariates is carried out through a new block-forward procedure. The INGARCH approach is adequate to model the outcome variable (respiratory hospital admissions) and the covariates, which advocates for the use of count time series approaches in this setting. Results show that the past history of the count process carries very relevant information and that temperature is the most determinant covariate, among the analysed, for daily hospital respiratory admissions. It is important to stress that, despite the small variability explained by air quality, all models include on average, approximately two air pollutants covariates besides temperature. Further analysis shows that the one-step-ahead forecasts distributions are well separated into two clusters: one cluster includes locations exclusively in the Lisbon area (exhibiting higher number of one-step-ahead hospital admissions forecasts), while the other contains the remaining locations. This results highlights that special attention must be given to air quality in Lisbon metropolitan area in order to ...

This works intends to investigate the ozone episodes reported in three different monitoring sites distributed along the Central region of Portugal (from the coast to inland direction). Ozone data time series are first analysed according to the legislation thresholds fulfilment (information threshold and target value) and two episodes are selected according to the magnitude and simultaneously exceedances at the three sites. The episodes are then analysed in terms of meteorological data (surface and vertical profiles) obtained with the WRF model and also using backtrajectories obtained with the HYSPLIT model. The integration of both results, together with the ozone and NO2 precursor concentration time series, allowed to conclude about the different origin of ozone in the two episodes. A sea breeze circulation is present in the first episode, inducing the transport of this pollutant and its precursors from the coast to inland (about 30 km), which is verified by the wind patterns and vertical profiles and by the daily profile of O-3 measured at the three sites. The second episode studied does not show so clearly this influence. Copyright (C) 2015 Turkish National Committee for Air Pollution Research and Control. Production and hosting by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Este trabalho teve como objetivo analisar a distribuição de recursos do Pronaf entre as regiões do Brasil, considerando levando em consideração aspectos como número de contratos, os montantes transferidos dos créditos, bem como os valores médios do Pronaf entre todas as regiões brasileiras nos anos de 1999 a 2014. Assim se buscou mostrar o comportamento desigual dos volumes de recursos de Pronaf apropriados pelas regiões brasileiras naquele período. Os dados da pesquisa foram coletados junto ao Banco Central. Estimaram-se modelos de tendência das variáveis, utilizando-se taxas geométricas de crescimento instantâneas (TGC) da evolução dos valores e dos contratos entre as regiões e entre os estados brasileiros. As evidências encontradas na pesquisa sustentaram a hipótese norteadora do estudo que era a de que os recursos do Pronaf, em suas diferentes modalidades são apropriados de forma desigual entre as regiões e os estados brasileiros, privilegiando as regiões e os estados mais desenvolvidas (Sul e Sudeste) em prejuízo das regiões mais carentes (Norte e Nordeste) e, assim, contribuindo para o incremento das desigualdades entre as regiões brasileiras.

Purpose: Brazil has adopted e-Health as a national policy applied to healthcare and education since 2006. The aim of the present study is to present the evolution of the legislation as it reflects the evolution of the Brazilian Telehealth Program along this period of time, as well as some learned lessons. Methods: To describe the evolution of the program, a model was adopted, and analysed in parallel to the three main edicts that oriented the evolution of the program. Results: The life cycle stages of e-health implementation were identified in the evolution of the 3 different stages of the Brazilian Telehealth Program and also reflected in the evolution of its legislation. The results of pilot project from the first stage was followed and guided the implementation of the National Program applied to primary health care in the second stage. The Program has been implemented all over the country, developed new concepts, became integrated to the Unified Health Systems not only in primary health care, but also include median and high complexity level of care. Conclusion: The Brazilian Telehealth Program, along his implementation and consolidation, established new concepts and had telehealth included in its roll of services. These accomplishments are reflected in the Brazilian legislation, which considers and applies e-Health as a national policy.

The intensification of the human activity in urban areas as a result of the increasing population has contributed to the air pollution worsening in cities. To reverse this trend, the European Commission established a legal framework to improve the air quality. Thereby the Member States need to develop air quality plans (AQP) for zones and agglomerations where air quality limit values are exceeded, in order to implement pollution control strategies and meet the legal requirements. Understanding the reasons for the levels of air quality non–compliance as well as evaluating available and commonly used tools to predict the air quality and their effects, is crucial for the decision–making process on air quality management policies. Based on a compilation of regional and local AQP, a review of assessment capabilities and used modeling tools to evaluate the effects of emission abatement measures on the air quality and health was performed. In most cases, models are applied to estimate emissions and to assess the resulting air quality from both reference and emission abatement scenarios. Air quality's impacts on the health and environment are rarely quantified. Regarding the air quality assessment, beyond the modeling, monitored data for validation of simulations are also used. Some studies, however, do not include the use of air quality models, considering the monitoring network as spatially representative of the study domain (e.g. Lisbon Region, Riga, Malta). In order to overcome methodological limitations for quantifying the impacts of emission abatement measures, economic evaluation techniques or even Integrated Assessment Methodologies (IAM) have been developed. IAM, already applied in some AQP or case studies, namely for Antwerp and London, are used for assessing how reductions in emissions contribute to improve air quality, reduce exposure and protect human health.

During the summer season, ozone concentrations regularly exceed the legislation limits in the North of Portugal, namely at Douro Norte monitoring station. The origin of such ozone episodes has been widely reported in several studies although uncertainties regarding its origin still remain. This work intends to investigate how the ozone concentrations measured at the Douro Norte nearest stations, located at west and east directions, are related to those measured at Douro Norte by means of coherence and phase transformations methods. The episodes were selected according to the magnitude of the hourly ozone peaks and the occurrence of exceedances of the threshold value at least in two sites. The results point out that 60 % of the selected episodes highlight significant dependence between Douro Norte station and the other two monitoring sites, with different phase signal and a delay range from 2 to 4 h. ; The authors wish to thank the financial support of the Comiss˜ao de Coordenac¸ ˜ao e Desenvolvimento Regional do Norte (CCDR-N). Thanks are extended to the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology for the financial support through the Project MAPLIA (PTDC/AAG-MAA/4077/2012), and the PhD grant of Carla Gama (SFRH/BD/87468/2012) and the Pos-Doc grant of S. Gouveia (SFRH/-BPD/87037/2012), and CIDMA/UA project PEst- OE/MAT/UI4106/2014 (Centro de Investigac¸ ˜ao e Desenvolvimento em Matem´atica e Aplicac¸ ˜oes, CIDMA/UA, Aveiro, www.cidma.mat. ua.pt), and IEETA/UA project PEst-OE/EEI/-UI0127/2014 (Instituto de Engenharia Electr´onica e Telem´atica de Aveiro, IEETA/UA, Aveiro, www.ieeta.pt). ; info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion