The US EPA regional emission model SMOKE was adopted and modified to create temporally and spatially distributed emission for Europe and surroundingcountries based on official reports and public domain data only. The aim isto develop a flexible model capable of creating consistent high resolutionemission data for long-term runs of Chemical Transport Models (CTMs). This modified version of SMOKE, called SMOKE for EUROPE (SMOKE-EU) wassuccessfully used to create hourly gridded emissions for the timespan1970-2010. In this paper the SMOKE-EU model and the underlying European datasets areintroduced. Emission data created by SMOKE-EU for the year 2000 are evaluatedby comparison to data of three different state-of-the-art emission models.SMOKE-EU produced a range of values comparable to the other three datasets.Further, concentrations of criteria pollutants calculated by the CTM CMAQusing the four different emission datasets were compared against EMEPmeasurements with hourly and daily resolution. Using SMOKE-EU gave the mostreliable modelling of O₃, NO₂ and SO₄ ^2-. The amount of simulatedconcentrations within a factor of 2 (F2) of the observations for thesespecies are: O₃ (F2 =Combining double low line 0.79, N =Combining double low line 329 197), NO2 (F2 =Combining double low line 0.55, N =Combining double low line 11 465) and SO₄ ^2- (F2 =Combining double low line 0.62, N= Combining double low line 17 536). The lowestvalues were found for NH₄⁺ (F2 =Combining double low line 0.34, N =Combining double low line 7400) and NO ₃^-(F2 =Combining double low line 0.25, N= Combining double low line 6184). NH₄⁺ concentrations were generallyoverestimated, leading to a fractional bias (FB) averaged over 22 measurementstations of (FB =Combining double low line 0.83 ± 0.41) while better agreements withobservations were found for SO₄^2- (FB =Combining double low line 0.06 ± 0.38,51 stations) and NO ₃^- (FB =Combining double low line 0.13 ± 0.75, 18 stations). CMAQ simulations using the three other emission datasets were similar tothose modelled using SMOKE-EU emissions. Highest differences where found for NH₄⁺ while O₃ concentrations were almost identical.