AAAR 36th Annual Conference October 16 - October 20, 2017 Raleigh Convention Center Raleigh, North Carolina, USA
Abstract View
High Resolution Air Quality Modeling in an Urban Area
PABLO GARCIA, Peter Adams, Spyros Pandis, Carnegie Mellon University
Abstract Number: 630 Working Group: Urban Aerosols
Abstract Human activity in urban areas produces significant emissions of atmospheric pollutants that have adverse health effects on those exposes. Multiple emission sources have significant spatial variations on the urban scale such as restaurant and traffic emissions. Determining the spatial resolution of pollutants associated to these sources requires high resolution emissions inventories, simulations and measurements to accurately determine their health impacts. A high resolution emission inventory was developed for the city of Pittsburgh and surrounding counties based on the EPA’s National Emission Inventory (NEI) with novel spatial surrogates to geographically distribute emissions in a grid of 1x1 km cells. This inventory was used to predict gaseous pollutants and speciated particle matter (PM) concentrations with the PMCAMx chemical transport model for the period of the Center for Air, Climate and Energy Solutions (CACES) campaign in Pittsburgh. Model predictions were compared with measurements taken with a mobile laboratory at high spatiotemporal resolution in urban and suburban areas in Pittsburgh. The predictions were also compared with measurements from the CACES supersite. These comparisons were repeated with a baseline simulation using the standard NEI approach. PMCAMx predicts concentrations reasonably well, showing improvement when compared to the standard NEI approach.