US EPA

The Air Quality Assessment Final Report is intended for managers and scientists working on air quality to provide them with information on the potential effects of climate change on regional air quality in the United States.

The earth’s climate governs several of the natural processes that influence air quality. Climate change, along with other aspects of global change, including changes in population, land use and the technologies employed for energy production and transportation, may alter the capacity for US states to successfully attain the national air quality standards in the future. In 2000, the US EPA ORD Global Change Research Program (GCRP) initiated a research and assessment program devoted to the evaluation of the potential impact of global change on US air quality. The overall design of the research and assessment program benefitted from input provided by the EPA Office of Air and Radiation, several EPA Regional offices, and the climate change research community. The EPA GCRP air quality research and assessment program is analyzing the complex role of global change processes in US air quality in two phases. The major effort undertaken in Phase 1 included the development of modeling tools that:

1. incorporate the physical and chemical links between global- and regional-scale meteorological processes to project future regional air quality, and;
2. account for changes in energy and transportation technologies in future air quality-related emissions.

The regional air quality modeling results from this first effort, focusing primarily on the sensitivity of air quality to changing climate, are the subject of the 2007 GCAQ Interim assessment report. Phase 2 of this effort is focused upon the incorporation of possible national and regional population; land use, energy production and transportation technology scenarios with global climate scenarios with to produce integrated projections of the effects of global change on US air quality. The ultimate goal of the EPA GCRP air quality research and assessment effort is to provide air quality managers with the scientific information and tools to evaluate the implications of global change for their programs – and enhance their ability to adapt to global change, if needed.

This interim report is intended for managers and scientists working on air quality to provide them with information on the potential effects of climate change on regional air quality in the United States.

This is the final report.

U.S. EPA. Assessment of the Impacts of Global Change on Regional U.S. Air Quality: A Synthesis of Climate Change Impacts on Ground-Level Ozone (An Interim Report of the U.S. EPA Global Change Research Program). U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Washington, DC, EPA/600/R-07/094F, 2009.