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Web-based tool for exposure assessment of traffic-related air pollutants at city scales
Citation:
Arunachalam, S., B. Naess, C. Seppanen, V. Isakov, AND T. Barzyk. Web-based tool for exposure assessment of traffic-related air pollutants at city scales. 10th International Conference on Urban Climate/ 14th Symposium on the Urban Environment, New York, New York, August 06 - 10, 2018.
Impact/Purpose:
It is important to have tools available for urban planners in global mega-cities that are seeing extensive growth in mobile source emissions and associated increases in exposures to traffic-related air pollutants in the near-source environment. This presentation will discuss the data needs for easy adaptation and implementation of the community tools and will show illustrations for extending C-LINE to other cities based on user-defined customized input data (e.g. Google’s Waze for traffic activity patterns, WUDAPT for building dimensions, and UMEP for boundary layer parameters).
Description:
This presentation describes the web-based, easy-to-use tool (i.e. C-LINE) to study air pollution exposures due to various sources at a community or city scale. The power of such tools is the ability to make these assessments at a fairly rapid pace, and to assess “what-if” scenarios on-demand. These tool exploit meteorology from the U.S. NWS, traffic activity from the U.S. DOT and emissions factors from the U.S. EPA. The screening-level what-if scenarios are created by changing input parameters related to activity, emissions or even meteorological parameters to predict changes in associated air quality and health risk at community and city scales. The algorithms in these tools are reduced-form versions of other established models, and after extensive validation, are optimized for quick execution through the web-based interface. These tools have been developed and applied to several areas within the U.S. and to Porto, Portugal. However, such web-based, easy-to-use modeling systems are of potential interest to urban planners in global mega-cities that are seeing extensive growth in mobile source emissions and associated increases in exposures to traffic-related air pollutants in the near-source environment. There is also interest in developing such community-scale modeling capabilities in places where emission inventories are not readily available (e.g. India, South America). This presentation discusses the data / infrastructure needs and potential connections that can be made to additional datasets such as Google’s Waze for traffic activity patterns, World Urban Database and Portal Tool (WUDAPT) for building dimensions, canopy width, Urban Multi-scale Environmental Predictor (UMEP) for enhanced characterization for additional boundary layer parameters
URLs/Downloads:
https://www.ametsoc.org/index.cfm/ams/meetings-events/ams-meetings/10th-international-conference-on-urban-climat