AAAR 34th Annual Conference
October 12 - October 16, 2015
Hyatt Regency
Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA
Abstract View
Seasonal Differences in Ambient Particulate Matter Pollution in the Tibetan Plateau
ELLISON CARTER, Kun Ni, Scott Archer-Nicholls, Alex Lai, James Schauer, Majid Ezzati, Christine Wiedinmyer, Xudong Yang, Jill Baumgartner, University of Minnesota
Abstract Number: 677 Working Group: Haze in China: Sources, Formation Mechanisms, and Current Challenges
Abstract Cooking and heating with biomass fuels emits high concentrations of pollutants that are both damaging to health and potentially important contributors to regional air quality and climate change. Though cooking emissions and exposures have been well studied, the relationships between household air pollution and ambient air quality are poorly understood. We measured continuous ambient fine particulate matter (PM2.5) during three months in summer (June, July, August 2014) and two months in winter (December 2014, January 2015) at a field site in rural Sichuan, China. At this same field site, we enrolled 201 rural Chinese women who primarily cook and heat their homes with biomass fuels, and measured their 48-hr personal exposure to PM2.5 during the same months in summer (non-heating) and winter (heating) seasons. Real-time and integrated kitchen PM2.5 concentrations were simultaneously collected, along with detailed information on housing characteristics and energy and fuel-use patterns. Average monthly ambient PM2.5 concentrations ranged from 30 ± 27 µg/m3 in June to 13.4 ± 10 µg/m3 in December. Women’s geometric mean personal PM2.5 exposure and kitchen PM2.5 concentrations were 81 µg/m3 (95% CI: 74, 88) and 159 µg/m3 (95% CI: 141, 179), respectively. We evaluated a series of regression models with different covariates including village location, kitchen ventilation, and measurement season to estimate relationships between personal, household, and ambient PM2.5 concentrations. We anticipate that results from this study and our approach can be applied in future work to estimate the impacts of cooking and heating activities on ambient air pollution concentrations, and ultimately improve our estimates of regional air quality and climate impacts.