TM5-FASST: a global atmospheric source–receptor model for rapid impact analysis of emission changes on air quality and short-lived climate pollutants

This paper describes, documents, and validates the TM5-FAst Scenario Screening Tool (TM5-FASST), a global reduced-form air quality source–receptor model that has been designed to compute ambient pollutant concentrations as well as a broad range of pollutant-related impacts on human health, agricultural crop production, and short-lived pollutant climate metrics, taking as input annual pollutant emission data aggregated at the national or regional level. The TM5-FASST tool, providing a trade-off between accuracy and applicability, is based on linearized emission-concentration sensitivities derived with the full chemistry-transport model TM5. The tool has been extensively applied in various recent critical studies. Although informal and fragmented validation has already been performed in various publications, this paper provides a comprehensive documentation of all components of the model and a validation against the full TM5 model. We find that the simplifications introduced in order to generate immediate results from emission scenarios do not compromise the validity of the output and as such TM5-FASST is proven to be a useful tool in science-policy analysis. Furthermore, it constitutes a suitable architecture for implementing the ensemble of source–receptor relations obtained in the frame of the HTAP modelling exercises, thus creating a link between the scientific community and policy-oriented users.