Citation:

CHING, J. K., A. HANNA, F. CHEN, S. BURIAN, AND T. HULTGREN. FACILITATING ADVANCED URBAN METEOROLOGY AND AIR QUALITY MODELING CAPABILITIES WITH HIGH RESOLUTION URBAN DATABASE AND ACCESS PORTAL TOOLS. Presented at Proceedings of the Sixth International Urban Air Quality Conference, Limassol, CYPRUS, March 27 - 29, 2007.

Impact/Purpose:

The objective of this task is to improve EPA's ability to accurately predict the concentrations and deposition of air pollutants in the atmosphere that are known or suspected to cause cancer or other serious health effects to humans, or adverse environmental effects. It is an essential component of EPA's National Air Toxics Assessment (NATA), which seeks to identify and quantify the concentrations and sources of those hazardous air pollutants which are of greatest potential concern, in terms of contribution to population risk. It is a major contributor to NERL's Air Toxics Research Program.

"Air toxics" or "hazardous air pollutants" (HAPs) is a category that covers a large variety of chemicals, which range from relatively non reactive to extremely reactive; can exist in the gas, aqueous, and/or particle phases; display a large range of volatilities; experience varying deposition velocities, including in some cases revolatilization; and are emitted from a wide variety of sources at a large variety of different scales. In addition, concentrations of air toxics are needed by regulators for both short (days) as well as long (up to a year) time scales. These requirements challenge our current capabilities in air quality models far beyond the needs for other pollutants, such as ozone. The specific work being done under this task involves 1.) developing and testing chemical mechanisms which are appropriate for describing the chemistry of air toxics; 2.) incorporating these chemical and physical mechanisms into EPA's CMAQ modeling system and applying the model at a variety of scales; and 3.) developing the methods for using models to predict HAPs concentrations at subgrid or neighborhood scales; and 4.) using these tools to assess the magnitude and variability of concentrations to which urban populations are exposed.

Description:

Information of urban morphological features at high resolution is needed to properly model and characterize the meteorological and air quality fields in urban areas. We describe a new project called National Urban Database with Access Portal Tool, (NUDAPT) that addresses this need. NUDAPT is designed to produce gridded fields of urban canopy parameterizations to improve urban meteorological simulations given the availability of new high-resolution data of urban buildings and land use. An important core-design feature is the utilization of Portal technology to enable NUDAPT to be a "Community" based system. Sensitivity studies showing air quality simulations driven with outputs from urban meteorology preprocessors using advanced urban descriptions are described.

Record Details: