Impact/Purpose:

The objective of this task is to improve modelers' ability to focus on scientific and management issues in modeling studies by providing software that supports evaluating and applying complex systems of models. The objective is to also provide software that enables or supports linking different media models together to better address multimedia issues.

Description:

A long term goal of multimedia environmental management is to achieve sustainable ecological resources. Progress towards this goal rests on a foundation of science-based methods and data integrated into predictive multimedia, multi-stressor open architecture modeling systems. The strategic pathway aim is to progress from addressing one stressor at a time to a comprehensive multimedia assessment capability for current and projected ecosystem health. The multimedia tasks in AMD address a number of issues that arise in multimedia modeling with an emphasis on interactions among the atmosphere and multiple other environmental media. While the watershed is a fundamental unit of ecosystem analysis, due primarily to its containment of the hydrologic cycle and related stresses, the relevant atmospheric scale of modeling and analysis for linking to watersheds is regional/continental in scope, encompassing multiple States and/or watersheds. The interaction between the atmosphere and the underlying surface is increasingly being recognized as an important factor in multimedia issues. Targeted development, evaluation and application of state-of-the-art, multi-pollutant atmospheric models of nitrogen and mercury to multimedia issues help determine how to further improve the one-atmosphere models and support ongoing ecological assessments. Software tools are needed to support linkage of models across media and specialized multimedia data analysis applications. This multimedia work helps to bring the results of air pollution control, that primarily stem from addressing human health effects, into the management purview for addressing multimedia or ecosystem problems. The multimedia tasks support Goal 4 (Healthy Communities and Ecosystems) and its Long-Term Goals ECO-3, Restoration - develop scientifically defensible methods to protect ecosystem conditions, and HG-3, Transport and fate - understand the transport and fate of mercury from release to the receptor.

Significant effort is often required to analyze observations and model results and provide them in a form required to support management decisions. Most off-the-shelf tools do not address the specialized needs or applications encountered in analyzing data from a multimedia perspective, making it more difficult than is necessary to and link elements of the multimedia components together. The need for specialized tools is especially pertinent to bringing atmospheric components together with watershed components for multimedia management analyses.

This task undertakes the development of tools for specialized multimedia analyses and applications involving atmospheric models. A tool, the Model Evaluation Toolkit, that recently has been developed at the prototype level in the R open software statistical system will be extended to incorporate more advanced model and data comparison capabilities. A second tool, the Aggregation Method Tool, which recently has been converted to the R system for easy access by the modeling community will be extended beyond providing climatological average seasonal and annual deposition to also provide climatological average regional haze and the distribution of growing season ozone for assessment applications. A new, third tool will be completed that will allow watershed and TMDL managers to overlay gridded atmospheric deposition estimates, from the Aggregation Method Tool, with watershed boundaries to map the deposition to their watersheds. This deposition mapper will allow many TMDL managers in the States and Regions to include atmospheric deposition into their TMDL plans where currently atmospheric deposition is being ignored due to lack of information and relevant tools.

Record Details:

Record Type:PROJECT

Start Date:10/01/2005

Projected Completion Date:09/01/2007

OMB Category:Other

Record ID: 114554

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Project Information:

Progress :A first version of the Spatial Allocator was made available to users in 12/2002.

A preliminary version of the RMET tool was delivered to AMD in 12/2003. RMET provides model evaluation capability for working with CMAQ simulations and measurement data, particularly graphical displays of the comparisons. The tool handles CMAQ output in Models-3 I/O-API format. The statistical routines and graphics use R, an open source statistical package. AMD Division-wide training on R and on the RMET tool took place in October 2004.

The R Aggregation Method Tool, RAGG, together with documentation and a test data set was delivered in September 2004. A Research Abstract describing this work is available on TIS under FY04 APM268. RAGG is an implementation in R of the CMAQ episodic model aggregation method developed by Constella Group and EPA. RAGG takes a defined set of 40 CMAQ 5-day cases simulated for a specified emissions year and combines them via weighted averages to create climatological seasonal and annual average wet and dry deposition estimates for nitrogen and sulfur across the United States. This package is on the EPA?s anonymous ftp site for download. The ftp site can be reached from the AMD website page on Modeling Tools (www.epa.gov/asmdnerl/modeling.html) under the main heading Multimedia Modeling Tools and subheading Climatological Deposition for Multimedia Modeling. A URL is also provided for the R website in case a user needs to install R.



Relevance :Addressing multimedia issues often requires working with multiple types of models and data sets. In many cases, proper software tools allow environmental scientists and managers to perform their work with less effort or allow them to develop insights that they might have missed. The software tools developed by this project are for community use, but especially will allow EPA and the States to conduct their work more effectively and efficiently and provide for a more complete multimedia approach. These tools will allow new users to be able to take advantage of the results of the more advanced air quality models for multimedia applications. The tools will also allow ecosystem and watershed managers, like TMDL coordinators, bring atmospheric deposition into their planning for a more accurate multimedia analyses, where before consideration of atmospheric deposition was entirely absent.



Clients :AMD, OAQPS, Chesapeake Bay Program, Office of Water (Dov Weitman (202) 566-1207), EPA Regional TMDL Coordinators (Fred Suffian (215) 814-5753), States

Project IDs:

ID Code :20477

Project type :OMIS