Citation:

RAO, S.T. INTEGRATING AIR QUALITY DATA TO INFORM HUMAN HEALTH DECISIONS. Presented at Integrated Earth Observations: Application to Air Quality and Human Health, Research Triangle Park, NC, August 01 - 02, 2005.

Impact/Purpose:

The framework of accountability is based on measuring environmental outcomes using an integrated environmental assessment model - - assessing and documenting relationships between emissions, air quality, atmospheric deposition, and effects to public health and ecosystems. Work in AMD will focus on relating changes in emissions to changes in environmental conditions prospectively, and the retrospective attribution of observable improvements in environmental conditions to specific emission control strategies.

1.Emission reductions observed in ambient air and atmospheric deposition

Since the 1990 Clean Air Act Amendments, a greater number of stationary sources of SO2 and NOx emissions have installed continuous emissions monitoring systems. Improved systems for tracking emissions from mobile sources have also been developed. At this level, an accountability framework provides a bridge between measured emission reductions and changes in the ambient environment. Resources under this initiative would be applied to analyze specific primary and transformed emission products in ambient air and in atmospheric deposition (e.g., nitrogen oxide, particle nitrate) over relevant geographic areas.

2.Predicted air quality and atmospheric deposition improvements

Resources would be applied to enhance the predictive capability to address whether emissions reductions have resulted in the expected improvements in air quality and deposition, for example:

Reduced ozone, PM2.5 concentrations

Reduced deposition of NOx transformations (e.g., wet and dry deposition of nitrate)

Diagnostic species (e.g., peroxides, nitric acid, ammonia) useful for model evaluations and interpreting dynamic changes in the atmosphere associated emissions reductions

In addition to assessing whether the improvements have occurred, this would also entail assessing whether these improvements can be attributed to specific emission control strategies.This team's objective is to research and develop analytical tools that will quantify the effect of regional NOx emission reductions on ambient air quality, thus providing a measure of control stategy accountability.

Description:

The August 1-2, 2005 EPA-NIEHS workshop is addressing the linkages between air quality and human health. My presentation will discuss the strengths and limitations of various databases for relating air quality to health impacts. Specifically, the need for fusing ground-based, satellite-based, and model-based data to generate high-resolution maps of air pollutant concentrations will be discussed to build confidence in examining the relationships between air quality and human health.

Record Details: