You are here:
AIR QUALITY MODELING AT COARSE-TO-FINE SCALES IN URBAN AREAS
Citation:
Ching, J.K S., S. Dupont, J Herwehe, T L. Otte, A. Lacser, D W. Byun, AND R. Tang. AIR QUALITY MODELING AT COARSE-TO-FINE SCALES IN URBAN AREAS. Presented at Conference on Atmospheric Chemistry: Air Quality in Megacities, Seattle, WA, January 11-15, 2004.
Impact/Purpose:
The objective of this task is to develop and evaluate numerical and physical modeling tools for simulating ground-level concentrations of airborne substances in urban settings at spatial scales ranging from ~1-10 km. These tools will support client needs in the areas of air toxics and homeland security. The air toxics tools will benefit the National Air Toxics Assessment (NATA) program and human exposure modeling needs within EPA. The homeland security-related portion of this task will help in developing tools to assess the threat posed by the release of airborne agents. Both sets of tools will consider the effects induced by urban morphology on fine-scale concentration distributions.
Description:
Urban air toxics control strategies are moving towards a community based modeling approach, with an emphasis on assessing those areas that experience high air toxic concentration levels, the so-called "hot spots". This approach will require information that accurately maps and characterizes the spatial and temporal variability of pollutants. Many air toxic pollutants are active in photochemistry and their ambient concentration levels will depend on the magnitude of the secondary products from the inflow regional background as well as from fresh emissions. In principle, the Community Multi-scale Air Quality (CMAQ) modeling system, using multi-scale modeling attributes can provide the ambient concentrations of air toxics from both regional and local sources and through advanced treatment of chemical, transport and deposition pathways. This paper explores the CMAQ capability to model air toxics at fine scale to meet the desired air toxics assessments objectives.
This paper has been reviewed in accordance with United States Environmental Protection Agency's peer and administrative review policies and approved for presentation and publication.