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Air quality modeling for community-scale assessments around airports
Citation:
Arunachalam, S., V. Isakov, T. Barzyk, A. Venkatram, J. Weil, B. Naess, A. Valencia, C. Seppanen, AND J. Brandmeyer. Air quality modeling for community-scale assessments around airports. 18th Int Conf on Harmonisation within Atmospheric Dispersion Modelling for Regulatory Purposes, Bologna, ITALY, October 09 - 12, 2017.
Impact/Purpose:
The HARMO conference presents an opportunity to extend and further develop ORD’s collaboration with our European colleagues. This paper describes a methodology for characterizing urban-scale air quality impacts of airport operations and shows an illustration of the model application at the Los Angeles International airport. With a growing economy, aircraft activity is expected to grow across the world and in the US, airport-related emissions, while generally small, are not an insignificant source of air pollution, and related adverse health effects. Therefore, it is important to have tools available that can easily be applied to study near-source pollution, and explore the benefits of improvements to air quality and exposures due to voluntary or mandatory programs.
Description:
Transportation infrastructure (including roadway traffic, ports, and airports) is critical to the nation’s economy. With a growing economy, aircraft activity is expected to grow across the world, and in the U.S. airport-related emissions, while generally small, are not an insignificant source of air pollution, and related adverse health effects. However, currently there is a lack of tools that can easily be applied to study near-source pollution, and explore the benefits of improvements to air quality and exposures due to voluntary or mandatory programs. This presentation will describe the web-based, easy-to-use modeling system to study urban-scale air quality impacts of airport operations. The tool will access various inputs, perform dispersion calculations, visualize results, provide options to manipulate input variables, and perform basic data analysis. It is intended to inform community decision-makers of local air quality due to airport related sources in their region of interest using a simplified modeling approach. In recent years, several studies have been undertaken by airports to study their impacts on ambient air quality as well as assess health risk due to airport-related emissions. We will present an illustration of the model application at the Los Angeles International airport, and discuss the model validation against measurements taken during the LAX Air Quality Source Apportionment Study during 2011/2012.
