AAAR 35th Annual Conference October 17 - October 21, 2016 Oregon Convention Center Portland, Oregon, USA
Abstract View
Is Smoke on Your Mind?: Using Social Media to Improve Estimates of Smoke Exposure
Bonne Ford, Moira Burke, William Lassman, Gabriele Pfister, JEFFREY R. PIERCE, Colorado State University
Abstract Number: 38 Working Group: Aerosol Exposure
Abstract Exposure to poor air quality is associated with negative impacts on human health. A large natural source of PM in the western U.S. is from wildland fires. Accurately attributing health endpoints to wildland-fire smoke requires a determination of the exposed population. This is a difficult endeavor, because most current methods for monitoring air quality are not at high temporal and spatial resolutions. Therefore, there is a growing effort to include multiple datasets and create blended products which can exploit the strengths of each dataset. In this work, we use a social-media dataset of self-reported smoke/haze/pollution to improve population-level exposure estimates for the summer of 2015, which was a particularly smoky year in the U.S. We compare this dataset to several other datasets that are commonly used for estimating exposure to wildland-fire smoke, such as satellite observations, surface measurements, and model (WRF-Chem) simulated surface concentrations.