AAAR 31st Annual Conference
October 8-12, 2012
Hyatt Regency Minneapolis
Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA
Abstract View
Evaluation of a 7-Year Air Quality Simulation Study for Eastern United States
HONGLIANG ZHANG, Gang Chen, Qi Ying, Jianlin Hu, Michael Kleeman, Texas A&M University
Abstract Number: 506 Working Group: Aerosol Exposure
Abstract Ozone and fine particulate matter have been shown to have adverse effects on human health. 3D air quality models can provide detailed ozone and PM concentrations and chemical components information for epidemiology analysis. In this study, a 7-year (2000-2006) air quality simulation is conducted over East US and the outputs will be used to connect PM exposure with human health outcomes after being validated. High resolution (4x4 km) domains are used to provide detailed air quality predictions of ozone, SO2, NOx, CO, PM2.5 mass and PM2.5 EC, POA and SOA at 7 cities: Chicago (IL), NYC (NY), Detroit (MI), Pittsburgh (PA), St. Paul (MN), Baltimore (MD), and Winston-Salem (NC). In this study, the performance of the meteorology model (WRF v3.2.1) and the air quality model (CMAQ v4.7.1) in predicting the observed meteorology and air quality are evaluated with all available surface observation data. Population averaged exposures to various air pollutants will be calculated. The ability of the model simulations to reproduce the observation are evaluated using different averaging times (hourly, daily, weekly and monthly) and different spatial averaging scales (from fixed stations to county-level) and all modeled species. This information provides useful guidance for epidemiologists to properly averaging the model predicted data before applying them to further statistical analysis.