AAAR 33rd Annual Conference
October 20 - October 24, 2014
Rosen Shingle Creek
Orlando, Florida, USA
Abstract View
Estimating the Impact of Air Pollution Controls on Ambient Concentrations
LUCAS HENNEMAN, David Lavoue, Heather Holmes, James Mulholland, Armistead Russell, Georgia Institute of Technology
Abstract Number: 528 Working Group: Source Apportionment
Abstract Air pollution controls are costly. Given such costs, there are concerns as to the efficacy of specific policies and regulations in terms of providing the expected air quality benefits. The air pollution accountability chain is defined by five links: regulations, emissions, air quality, exposure/dose, and human health impacts. This Health Effects Institute-funded research takes advantage of existing long-term air quality, meteorology and acute health effects data to investigate the relationships between past regulatory actions, emissions, and ambient air pollution concentrations in Atlanta.
Meteorological detrending, using nonlinear filtering based on a Taylor Series decomposition and statistical models, is used to account for the variability in measured concentrations associated with meteorology and the seasonality in emissions. Detrended time series of pollutant concentrations and emissions estimates are used to identify techniques that can be used to investigate how changes form a specific regulatory emissions control impact observed pollutant concentrations. The techniques are also used to derive empirical sensitivities of measured ambient concentrations to changes in pollutant emissions. These empirically derived sensitivities of ambient concentrations to changes in emissions are compared to sensitivities calculated using CMAQ-DDM (the Community Multiscale Air Quality Model with the Decoupled Direct Method). These results investigate regulations implemented in the Southeastern United States, specifically the Tier 2 Vehicle and Gasoline Sulfur Program (2004), the 2007 Heavy-Duty Highway Rule, the Acid Rain Program (1995), the Clean Air Interstate Rule (2008).
Outcomes of this study include the development of empirical and model-based approaches to estimate the emissions-air quality and meteorology-air quality relationships, including the associated uncertainties. These results establish a foundation to assess the impacts of regulatory emissions control strategies on human health outcomes.