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Influences of Regional Climate Change on Air Quality across the Continental U.S. Projected from Downscaling IPCC ARS Simulations
Citation:
Nolte, Chris, T. Otte, R. Pinder, J. Bowden, J. Herwehe, G. Faluvegi, AND D. Shindell. Influences of Regional Climate Change on Air Quality across the Continental U.S. Projected from Downscaling IPCC ARS Simulations. Chapter 2, Air Pollution Modeling and its Application XXII. Springer, Heidelburg, Germany, 2014:9-12, (2013).
Impact/Purpose:
The National Exposure Research Laboratory′s (NERL′s)Atmospheric Modeling Division (AMAD) conducts research in support of EPA′s mission to protect human health and the environment. AMAD′s research program is engaged in developing and evaluating predictive atmospheric models on all spatial and temporal scales for forecasting the Nation′s air quality and for assessing changes in air quality and air pollutant exposures, as affected by changes in ecosystem management and regulatory decisions. AMAD is responsible for providing a sound scientific and technical basis for regulatory policies based on air quality models to improve ambient air quality. The models developed by AMAD are being used by EPA, NOAA, and the air pollution community in understanding and forecasting not only the magnitude of the air pollution problem, but also in developing emission control policies and regulations for air quality improvements.
Description:
Projecting climate change scenarios to local scales is important for understanding, mitigating, and adapting to the effects of climate change on society and the environment. Many of the global climate models (GCMs) that are participating in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fifth Assessment Report (AR5) do not fully resolve regional-scale processes and therefore cannot capture regional-scale changes in temperatures and precipitation. We use a regional climate model (RCM) to dynamically downscale the GCM's large-scale signal to investigate the changes in regional and local extremes of temperature and precipitation that may result from a changing climate. In this paper, we show preliminary results from downscaling the NASA/GISS ModelE IPCC AR5 Representative Concentration Pathway (RCP) 6.0 scenario. We use the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model as the RCM to downscale decadal time slices (1995-2005 and 2025-2035) and illustrate potential changes in regional climate for the continental U.S. that arc projected by ModelE and WRF under RCP6.0. The regional climate change scenario is further processed using the Community Multiscale Air Quality modeling system to explore influences of regional climate change on air quality.