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Significantly reduced health burden from ambient air pollution in the U.S. under emission reductions from 1990 to 2010
Citation:
Zhang, Y., J. West, R. Mathur, J. Xing, C. Hogrefe, S. Roselle, J. Bash, Jon Pleim, M. Gan, AND David-C Wong. Significantly reduced health burden from ambient air pollution in the U.S. under emission reductions from 1990 to 2010. 2017 AAAR Conference, Raleigh, NC, October 16 - 20, 2017.
Impact/Purpose:
The National Exposure Research Laboratory (NERL) Computational Exposure Division (CED) develops and evaluates data, decision-support tools, and models to be applied to media-specific or receptor-specific problem areas. CED uses modeling-based approaches to characterize exposures, evaluate fate and transport, and support environmental diagnostics/forensics with input from multiple data sources. It also develops media- and receptor-specific models, process models, and decision support tools for use both within and outside of EPA.
Description:
The recent 2013 Global Burden of Disease Study 2013 has attributed the ambient PM2.5 as the fifth-ranking mortality risk factor in 2015. While assessing the global or national burden of disease attributed to air pollution has become more common, fewer studies have tried to understand how these burdens change through time. Here, we aim to use long-term modeling results to quantify how air pollution-related mortality has changed in the U.S. in each year from 1990 to 2010, and to quantify the importance of changes in contributing factors to the long-term trends. We use 21-year historical estimates of PM2.5 and ozone concentrations from 1990 to 2010 simulated with the coupled WRF-CMAQ model with consistent U.S. emission inventories, and annual county-level baseline mortality rates and population archived by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control. We find that the PM2.5-related health burdens have steadily decreased. The health burden has decreased by 54% from 1990 to 2010. The PM2.5 -related health burdens would decrease only by 26% if the PM2.5 concentrations had not decreased from 1990. The health burden decreases are caused by the combined effect of decrease in baseline mortality rates of major disease and annual PM2.5 concentrations. The health burden associated with O3 has larger inter-annual variations compared with PM2.5-related health burdens, which are dominated by the inter-annual O3 changes. The O3-related health burdens have increased by 28% for the past 2 decades, which is mainly caused by the increases of the baseline mortality rates and the population, despite ozone decreases. The O3-related health burden would have increased by 59% if the O3 concentration was kept constant at the 1990 level.
