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Modeling the impacts of green infrastructure land use changes on air quality and meteorology case study and sensitivity analysis in Kansas City
Citation:
Zhang, Y., J. Bash, S. Roselle, A. Shatas, C. Hogrefe, R. Mathur, A. Repinsky, AND T. Jacobs. Modeling the impacts of green infrastructure land use changes on air quality and meteorology case study and sensitivity analysis in Kansas City. 16th Annual CMAS Conference, Chapel Hill, North Carolina, October 23 - 25, 2017.
Impact/Purpose:
This poster will be given in a session on Global/Regional Modeling Applications at the 16th annual CMAS conference. The poster shows initial results from a pilot project, aimed at better understanding how changes in land-cover associated with urban planning efforts (green infrastructure) may affect meteorology and air quality in Kansas City, Missouri. The project demonstrates application of the WRF/CMAQ modeling system for estimating potential green infrastructure impacts on air quality.
Description:
Changes in vegetation cover associated with urban planning efforts may affect regional meteorology and air quality. Here we use a comprehensive coupled meteorology-air quality model (WRF-CMAQ) to simulate the influence of planned land use changes from green infrastructure implementation in Kansas City (KC) on regional meteorology and air quality. Current and a plausible green infrastructure land use scenarios were provided by the Mid-America Regional Council for 2012 and a scenario with land use changes due to green infrastructure implementation only. These land use datasets were incorporated into the WRF-CMAQ modeling system allowing the modeling system to propagate the changes in vegetation and impervious surface coverage on meteorology and air quality. The WRF-CMAQ model was run for the continental US using a 12km by 12km horizontal grid spacing and nested simulations for the greater Kansas City area were performed with a finer grid spacing of 4km by 4km. The simulations were performed for one year to study seasonal variations of the air quality changes stemming from the land use change. Preliminary model findings indicate that the adoption of green infrastructure reduced urban temperatures in the day and night. The change in pollutant concentrations is a balance between increased deposition to the increase in vegetation and the concentration of pollutants in a lower planetary boundary layer due to the cooling of urban areas. Primary emitted pollutants with a relatively slow deposition velocity, e.g. PM2.5, increased in these initial simulations. The initial simulations appear to be sensitive to the parameterization of the meteorological models land surface model. To further investigate this, several sensitivity simulations will be presented using different WRF configurations to further investigate the response of both meteorology and air quality to the planned land use changes.
