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Evaluation and development of tools to quantify the impacts of roadside vegetation barriers on near-road air quality
Citation:
Isakov, V., A. Venkatram, R. Baldauf, P. Deshmukh, AND M. Zhang. Evaluation and development of tools to quantify the impacts of roadside vegetation barriers on near-road air quality. 17th International Conference on Harmonization within Atmospheric Dispersion Modeling, Budapest, HUNGARY, May 09 - 12, 2016.
Impact/Purpose:
The National Exposure Research Laboratory (NERL) Computational Exposure Division (CED) develops and evaluates data, decision-support tools, and models to be applied to media-specific or receptor-specific problem areas. CED uses modeling-based approaches to characterize exposures, evaluate fate and transport, and support environmental diagnostics/forensics with input from multiple data sources. It also develops media- and receptor-specific models, process models, and decision support tools for use both within and outside of EPA
Description:
Regulatory and urban planning programs require an accurate evaluation of how traffic emissions transport and disperse from roads to fully determine exposures and health risks. Roadside vegetation barriers have shown the potential to reduce near-road air pollution concentrations; however, the characteristics of these barriers needed to ensure pollution reductions are not well understood. U.S. EPA conducted several field experiments to understand the effects of vegetation barriers on dispersion of pollutants near roadways (e.g. 2008 mobile monitoring study in Chapel Hill, North Carolina and 2014 mobile monitoring study in San Francisco Bay Area, California). The results of these field studies were used to evaluate dispersion models in simulating the effects of near road barriers and to develop recommendations for model improvements. The improved models can be used for evaluating the effectiveness of vegetation barriers as a potential mitigation strategy to reduce exposure to traffic-related pollutants and their associated adverse health effects. This paper presents the results of the analysis of the field studies and discusses the applicability of dispersion models to simulate the impacts of vegetation barriers.
