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Identifying Housing and Meteorological Conditions Influencing Residential Air Exchange Rates in the DEARS and RIOPA Studies: Development of Distributions for Human Exposure Modeling
Citation:
Isaacs, K., J. Burke, L. Smith, AND R. Williams. Identifying Housing and Meteorological Conditions Influencing Residential Air Exchange Rates in the DEARS and RIOPA Studies: Development of Distributions for Human Exposure Modeling. Journal of Exposure Science and Environmental Epidemiology . Nature Publishing Group, London, Uk, 23(3):248-258, (2013).
Impact/Purpose:
The National Exposure Research Laboratory′s (NERL′s) Human Exposure and Atmospheric Sciences Division (HEASD) conducts research in support of EPA′s mission to protect human health and the environment. HEASD′s research program supports Goal 1 (Clean Air) and Goal 4 (Healthy People) of EPA′s strategic plan. More specifically, our division conducts research to characterize the movement of pollutants from the source to contact with humans. Our multidisciplinary research program produces Methods, Measurements, and Models to identify relationships between and characterize processes that link source emissions, environmental concentrations, human exposures, and target-tissue dose. The impact of these tools is improved regulatory programs and policies for EPA.
Description:
Appropriate prediction of residential air exchange rate (AER) is important for estimating human exposures in the residential microenvironment, as AER drives the infiltration of outdoor-generated air pollutants indoors. AER differences among homes may result from a number of factors, including housing characteristics and meteorological conditions. Residential AER data collected in the Detroit Exposure and Aerosol Research Study (DEARS) and the Relationships of Indoor, Outdoor and Personal Air (RIOPA) study were analyzed to determine whether the influence of a number of housing and meteorological conditions on AER were consistent across four cities in different regions of the US (Detroit MI, Elizabeth NJ, Houston TX, Los Angeles CA). Influential factors were identified and used as binning variables for deriving final AER distributions for use in exposure modeling. In addition, both between-home and within-home variance in AER in DEARS were quantified with the goal of identifying reasonable AER resampling frequencies for use in longitudinal exposure modeling efforts. The results of this analysis indicate that residential AERs depended on ambient temperature, the presence (or not) of central air conditioning, and the age of the home. Furthermore, between-home variability in AER accounted for the majority (67%) of the total variance in AER for Detroit homes indicating lower within-home variability. These findings are compared to other previously published AER distributions, and the implications for exposure modeling are discussed.
URLs/Downloads:
DEARS_AER_PAPER_FINAL FINAL_CLEAN_SUBMITTED.PDF (PDF, NA pp, 431.057 KB, about PDF)Journal of Exposure Science and Environmental Epidemiology
