AAAR 36th Annual Conference October 16 - October 20, 2017 Raleigh Convention Center Raleigh, North Carolina, USA
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Significantly Reduced Health Burden from Ambient Air Pollution in the U.S. under Emission Reductions from 1990 to 2010
YUQIANG ZHANG, Jia Xing, Christian Hogrefe, Shawn Roselle, Jesse Bash, Jonathan Pleim, Chuen-Meei Gan, David Wong, Rohit Mathur, Jason West, U.S. EPA
Abstract Number: 413 Working Group: Regional and Global Air Quality and Climate Modeling
Abstract The recent 2013 Global Burden of Disease Study has listed 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 modelling of U.S. air quality 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 burden, including ischemic heart disease, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, lung cancer, and stroke, has steadily decreased, with a reduction of 54% from 1990 to 2010. The PM2.5 - related health burden would have decreased only by 26% if the PM2.5 concentrations had not decreased from 1990, due to decreases in baseline mortality rates for major diseases affected by PM2.5. The health burden associated with O3, including the chronic Respiratory diseases, has larger interannual variations compared with PM2.5-related health burden, which is dominated by the interannual O3 changes. The O3-related health burdens have increased by 28% from 1990 to 2010, which is mainly caused by increases in the baseline mortality rates and 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.