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“A Reduced-form Model to Estimate Near-road Air Quality for Communities: the Community Line Source modeling system (C-LINE)”
Citation:
Barzyk, T., V. Isakov, S. Arunachalam, A. Venkatram, R. Cook, AND B. Naess. “A Reduced-form Model to Estimate Near-road Air Quality for Communities: the Community Line Source modeling system (C-LINE)”. Presented at 2013 Annual CMAS Conference, Chapel Hill, NC, October 28 - 30, 2013.
Impact/Purpose:
The National Exposure Research Laboratory (NERL) Atmospheric Modeling and Analysis Division (AMAD) conducts research in support of EPA mission to protect human health and the environment. AMAD research program is engaged in developing and evaluating predictive atmospheric models on all spatial and temporal scales for forecasting the 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:
The paper presents the Community Line Source (C-LINE) modeling system that estimates toxic air pollutant (air toxics) concentration gradients within 500 meters of busy roadways for community-sized areas on the order of 100 km2. C-LINE accesses publicly available datasets with national coverage for model inputs; therefore, users are not required to supply input data, but user-supplied datasets can be uploaded and used if available. A user-friendly interface facilitates analysis of what-if scenarios. Users can modify traffic attributes on different road segments or area-wide meteorological conditions to evaluate respective changes in resulting air quality; for example, from an increase in the number of diesel vehicles on a given road segment. C-LINE is described as a modeling system, because it includes inputs, analytics, and visualization in a single package. It is currently housed in ArcGIS as a standalone application, which requires users to download C-LINE and have the appropriate software to run it; however, future work is geared toward making it an online application. C-LINE cannot be used for regulatory applications, but lends itself to community-based assessments related to an overall characterization of conditions or to relative changes in air toxics concentrations based on changes in traffic or meteorological conditions.