The ultimate target of the GEIA effort is to establish emissions inventories for all trace species of interest, incorporating fluxes from both anthropogenic and natural sources. All inventories are generated by international, intercontinental teams of specialists. It is hoped that the resulting authoritative inventories, periodically updated as appropriate, will be adopted as standards by the atmospheric modeling community, thus removing an area of uncertainty from inter-model comparisons and providing a recognized foundation from which emissions inventories can be modified and updated periodically. Every interested party is welcome to be included in the GEIA effort. Project Status GEIA inventory activities have been under way since the latter part of 1991.
Additional information appears in the references given below.
Completion and release of a number of other inventories is anticipated within the next several years. The pace will be strongly dictated by the amount of funding available to support travel, data entry, and associated activities. Those inventories will, of course, be improved as more detailed local information becomes available, especially for emissions from the less developed countries. Nonetheless, there is no scientific reason to avoid standardizing on the inventories now available for use in model studies. Historical estimates of emissions are much less reliable than those for the present epoch, but historical inventories based on unified global statistics and methodologies are beginning to appear.