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EMISSION INVENTORY PREPARATION IN SUPPORT OF AIR QUALITY MODELING AND BENEFITS ESTIMATION
Impact/Purpose:
Provide emission inventories for historical years and emission inventory projections for future years representing alternative regulatory or exogenous scenarios, for use in air quality modeling and regulatory benefits analysis.
Description:
Statutes and executive orders require that major national regulatory initiatives, for example new rules for emissions from motor vehicles or proposed legislation setting emission limits on electricity producing units, be studied for their cost and benefits. This often requires that air quality modeling be conducted to predict future air quality with and without the proposed control. It is also sometimes required to make future air quality predictions to determine the influence of exogenous changes for example population or vehicle travel growth. A third example is the National Air Toxics Assessment - National Scale Assessment, in which historical concentrations of hazardous air pollutants are estimates to provide information on program priorities and research needs. The air quality models required large and complex emission inventory files to represent each historical case of interest, and each future scenario of interest. These files are prepared starting with available national emission inventories, but often it is necessary to regenerate estimates for some source categories to reflect newer information and always it is necessary to apply growth and control factors to estimate future emissions. Update 10/2/2006: all related records to this activity were completed in March 2005; this record revised to reflect those completion dates.