10th International Aerosol Conference September 2 - September 7, 2018 America's Center Convention Complex St. Louis, Missouri, USA
Abstract View
Urban Air Quality Modeling at High Spatial Resolutions
PABLO GARCIA, Peter Adams, Spyros Pandis, Carnegie Mellon University
Abstract Number: 1517 Working Group: Aerosol Modeling
Abstract Human activities in dense urban areas produce significant emissions of atmospheric pollutants and their precursors and these have adverse health effects on the exposed population. Emission sources like traffic and restaurants have significant variations at the urban scale. Resolving the pollutant concentration fields and the health impacts associated with these and other sources requires emission inventories, measurements and simulations to be available at high resolutions. A high resolution emission inventory was developed for the city of Pittsburgh and surrounding counties based on the EPA’s National Emission Inventory (NEI) for 2011 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 national speciated PM networks and Aerosol Mass Spectrometer data from the CACES supersite. The predictions were also compared with measurements taken with a mobile laboratory at high spatiotemporal resolution in urban and suburban areas in Pittsburgh. 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.