Air pollution emission inventory and air quality modeling for Can Tho City, Mekong Delta, Vietnam Ho Quoc Bang 1 & Vu Hoang Ngoc Khue 1 & Nguyen Thoai Tam 1 & Kristofer Lasko 2 Received: 15 June 2017 /Accepted: 7 September 2017 # Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2017 Abstract Can Tho City has quickly become a modernized and industrialized city undergoing rapid population growth affecting the local environment, especially air quality and hu- man health. In 2015, Can Tho had 1,251,809 inhabitants with a total of 566,593 motorcycles and 15,105 automobiles. There are about 1000 factories in the city. The top polluters are the industries of textile and dyeing, food processing, cement, and steel mill and rice processing. The aims of this research are to (i) conduct a detailed air pollution emission inventory (ii) study the formation of the air pollution plume over the city, and (iii) study different pollution abatement strategies for the city. We employ a combination of bottom-up and top-down approaches to conduct air pollution emission inventory, then, the finite volume model-transport and photochemistry meso- scale model is applied for studying the formation of the pol- lution plume. The results showed that transportation and in- dustrial activities are the two main emission sources responsi- ble for 80% of total NO x , 90% of total SO 2, 75% of CO, 60% of total suspended particles, and 60% of non-methane volatile organic compounds. Modeling results showed that the highest average—1h—of O 3 is 206 μg/m 3 which is higher than the Vietnam ambient air quality standard. The pollution plume is developed in the northeastern part of the city. Finally, abate- ment measures were proposed. This is the first comprehensive study on air pollution emissions and air quality modeling in the Mekong Delta, yielding insight to support government authorities to promulgate plans and actions to reduce emis- sions, protecting human health and the environment while leading towards sustainable development. Keywords Air pollution emission inventory . Air quality modeling . Abatement strategies . Can Tho City . Vietnam Introduction Can Tho is a metropolitan city of Mekong Delta, Vietnam (Fig. 1 ). In 2015, Can Tho with 1438.96 km 2 had 1,251,809 inhabitants, a total of 566,593 motorcycles, and 15,105 automobiles. There are about 1000 factories in the city. The huge volume of private traffic such as motorcycles in a small surface area and industrial units in and around the city releases significant amounts of gaseous pollutants into the atmosphere. Critical concentrations of pollutants are found in the city, exceeding the air quality standards for total suspended particles (TSP) and O 3 (Tai and The 2015). The concentration of O 3 and TSP at traffic monitoring sites regu- larly exceeded the national technical regulation in ambient air quality (QCVN 05:2013). Especially, the concentration of TSP is 356.8 μg/m 3 (higher than QCVN 05:2013 with 300 μg/m 3 ) and the O 3 at the background monitoring site in 2016 exceeded the national technical regulation in ambient air quality (Tai and The 2015; Bang et al. 2017). With a high concentration of harmful pollutants, the air pollution is a major problem to which several million people are ex- posed. Smaller cities of today such as Can Tho City are the major cities and major pollution centers of tomorrow (Bang and Clappier 2011). There is an urgent need to * Ho Quoc Bang bangquoc@yahoo.com 1 Institute for Environment and Resources/Vietnam National University in Ho Chi Minh, 142 To Hien Thanh, Disct 10,, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam 2 Department of Geographical Sciences, University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742, USA Air Qual Atmos Health DOI 10.1007/s11869-017-0512-x