Grantee Research Project Results
2008 Progress Report: Changes in Climate, Pollutant Emissions, and US Air Quality: An Integrating Modeling Study
EPA Grant Number: R833374Title: Changes in Climate, Pollutant Emissions, and US Air Quality: An Integrating Modeling Study
Investigators: Adams, Peter , Pandis, Spyros N.
Institution: Carnegie Mellon University
EPA Project Officer: Chung, Serena
Project Period: March 1, 2007 through February 28, 2011 (Extended to February 28, 2012)
Project Period Covered by this Report: March 1, 2008 through February 28,2009
Project Amount: $896,596
RFA: Consequences of Global Change For Air Quality (2006) RFA Text | Recipients Lists
Research Category: Climate Change , Air
Objective:
The objective of this research is to quantify the effect of changes in climate, emissions, and long-range transport on air quality in the United States. In the process, we will answer the following questions:• How will ozone, PM, visibility, as well as mercury and acid deposition be affected by future changes in climate? Will these changes inhibit or assist efforts to improve air quality? Will the effects be similar for different areas, seasons, pollution problems?
• How important are the contributions of changes in regional meteorology, climate-sensitive emissions (biogenics, ammonia, etc), and intercontinental transport to the climate-related changes in US air quality?
• What are the most significant sources of uncertainty in projecting the effect of future climate on air quality? Given the uncertainty in climate, regional meteorology, emissions projections, and processes what is the range of these impacts? How bad is the worst-case scenario?
• What is the optimal way to develop a set of climate scenarios broad enough to span the range of possible future climates but concise enough to drive regional CTMs?
Specific tasks to be undertaken include the following:
Task 1: Development of a Climate/Weather-Sensitive Emissions Processor
Task 2: Extension of Global and Regional CTMs-Organic PM
Task 3: Extension of Global and Regional CTMs-Ultrafine PM
Task 4: Extension of Global and Regional CTMs-Mercury
Task 5: Development of Future Climate and Emissions Scenarios
Task 6: Assessment of global change impact on air quality
Task 7: Sensitivity and uncertainty assessment
Progress Summary:
This year has focused on Tasks 2-4 of the original proposal, namely the extension of the GRE-CAPS (Global-Regional Climate Air Pollution Modeling System) model. GRE-CAPS is a comprehensive modeling system that simulates climate and air quality and their interactions from global to regional scales. Tasks 2-4 enhance GRE-CAPS by including a state-of-the-art treatment of organic particulate matter (PM), ultrafine particles, and atmospheric mercury. These developments will result in improved assessments of how these species will change in the future due to changes in climate, domestic emissions, and other global changes.
The improvements to the organic aerosol model greatly improve the model’s ability to predict organic PM concentrations, their volatility and degree of oxygenation. This increases our confidence that the model is correctly simulating the sources and atmospheric processes that lead to organic PM.
We have developed the capability for a regional-scale air quality model to simulate ultrafine particles (particles smaller than 100 nm) and the sources that contribute to them. The model predicts, in agreement with observations, frequent nucleation events that take place over 100s to 1000s of kilometers especially in the Northeastern US. Detailed comparison with the observations of the Pittsburgh Air Quality Study (PAQS) suggests that the model reproduces reasonably well the details of the events in this sulfur rich area but has a tendency to overpredict the frequency of the events. Regional nucleation is predicted to increase the total number concentrations by roughly a factor of 2.5 over the whole domain. This indicates that both combustion and ambient new particle formation are significant contributors to the number concentrations of ultrafine particles.
Future Activities:
For the third year of the project (March 2009 through February 2010), we are focusing on the following tasks. First, we will enhance the GRE-CAPS modeling system by developing a climate-sensitive emissions processor, focusing on developing the capability on the regional scale to link biogenic emissions to the climate scenario under consideration (Task 1 of the original proposal). Additionally, we will begin to define future climate and emissions scenarios of interest (Task 5 of the original proposal) for assessing future air quality and its dependence on climate, global change, and domestic emissions.
Journal Articles on this Report : 11 Displayed | Download in RIS Format
Other project views: | All 29 publications | 21 publications in selected types | All 21 journal articles |
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Dawson JP, Adams PJ, Pandis SN. Sensitivity of PM2.5 to climate in the Eastern US: a modeling case study. Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics 2007;7(16):4295-4309. |
R833374 (2007) R833374 (2008) R833374 (2010) R833374 (Final) |
Exit Exit |
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Dawson JP, Racherla PN, Lynn BH, Adams PJ, Pandis SN. Simulating present-day and future air quality as climate changes: model evaluation. Atmospheric Environment 2008;42(19):4551-4566. |
R833374 (2007) R833374 (2008) R833374 (2010) R833374 (Final) |
Exit Exit Exit |
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Day MC, Pandis SN. Predicted changes in summertime organic aerosol concentrations due to increased temperatures. Atmospheric Environment 2011;45(36):6546-6556. |
R833374 (2007) R833374 (2008) R833374 (2010) R833374 (Final) |
Exit Exit Exit |
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Farina SC, Adams PJ, Pandis SN. Modeling global secondary organic aerosol formation and processing with the volatility basis set: implications for anthropogenic secondary organic aerosol. Journal of Geophysical Research–Atmospheres 2010;115(D9):D09202. |
R833374 (2007) R833374 (2008) R833374 (2010) R833374 (Final) |
Exit Exit Exit |
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Jathar SH, Farina SC, Robinson AL, Adams PJ. The influence of semi-volatile and reactive primary emissions on the abundance and properties of global organic aerosol. Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics 2011;11(15):7727-7746. |
R833374 (2007) R833374 (2008) R833374 (2010) R833374 (Final) R833748 (2010) R833748 (Final) |
Exit Exit |
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Jung JG, Pandis SN, Adams PJ. Evaluation of nucleation theories in a sulfur-rich environment. Aerosol Science and Technology 2008;42(7):495-504. |
R833374 (2007) R833374 (2008) R833374 (2010) R833374 (Final) |
Exit Exit |
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Jung J, Fountoukis C, Adams PJ, Pandis SN. Simulation of in situ ultrafine particle formation in the eastern United States using PMCAMx-UF. Journal of Geophysical Research–Atmospheres 2010;115(D3):D03203 (13 pp.). |
R833374 (2007) R833374 (2008) R833374 (2010) R833374 (Final) |
Exit Exit Exit |
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Lane TE, Donahue NM, Pandis SN. Effect of NOx on secondary organic aerosol concentrations. Environmental Science & Technology 2008;42(16):6022-6027. |
R833374 (2007) R833374 (2008) R833374 (2010) R833374 (Final) |
Exit Exit Exit |
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Lane TE, Donahue NM, Pandis SN. Simulating secondary organic aerosol formation using the volatility basis-set approach in a chemical transport model. Atmospheric Environment 2008;42(32):7439-7451. |
R833374 (2007) R833374 (2008) R833374 (2010) R833374 (Final) |
Exit Exit Exit |
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Lee YH, Adams PJ. Evaluation of aerosol distributions in the GISS-TOMAS global aerosol microphysics model with remote sensing observations. Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics 2010;10(5):2129-2144. |
R833374 (2007) R833374 (2008) R833374 (2010) R833374 (Final) |
Exit Exit |
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Racherla PN, Adams PJ. The response of surface ozone to climate change over the Eastern United States. Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics 2008;8(4):871-885. |
R833374 (2007) R833374 (2008) R833374 (2010) R833374 (Final) |
Exit Exit |
Supplemental Keywords:
Air quality modeling, smog, particulate matter, general circulation models, biogenic emissions, pollution., RFA, Scientific Discipline, Air, climate change, Air Pollution Effects, Environmental Monitoring, Atmospheric Sciences, Ecological Risk Assessment, Atmosphere, air quality modeling, particulate matter, atmospheric modelsRelevant Websites:
Each of the PIs maintains a web site:
Peter J. Adams: http://www.ce.cmu.edu/~adams/index.html
Spyros N. Pandis: http://www.cheme.cmu.edu/who/faculty/pandis.html
Progress and Final Reports:
Original AbstractThe perspectives, information and conclusions conveyed in research project abstracts, progress reports, final reports, journal abstracts and journal publications convey the viewpoints of the principal investigator and may not represent the views and policies of ORD and EPA. Conclusions drawn by the principal investigators have not been reviewed by the Agency.