Environmental Modeling And Software

[Nayme Cutforth]

EnvironmentalModeling & Assessment builds bridges between the scientific community's understanding of key environmental issues and decision makers' need to influence relevant policies and regulations on the basis of the best available information. The journal offers high-quality, peer-reviewed papers that may be regarded as either instances of best practice, or as studies that advance the evolution and applicability of the theories and techniques of modeling and assessment. In particular, the editors are interested both in detailed scientific models of specific environmental problems and in large scale models of the global environment. The journal also provides a forum where researchers can publish a complete mathematical description of important environmental models together with the accompanying analysis and underlying assumptions. The journal publishes best-practice papers, as well as studies that advance the evolution and applicability of the theories and techniques of modeling and assessment.

Modeling is an important component of all environmental work at EPA. It helps inform both decisions and policies. Models improve understanding of natural systems and how they react to changing conditions, such as exposure to hazardous substances and the temporal and dose effects from the exposure.

The Center for Environmental Modeling for Policy Development (CEMPD) within the Institute is a team of research faculty and scientists with a strong reputation in emissions, meteorology and air quality modeling, and performing interdisciplinary research that connects emissions sources with air quality and health. The Global Burden of Disease (2019) estimates that about 6.7 million people die prematurely due to exposure to air pollution, making it the 4th highest risk factor for human health. CEMPD provides research, development and application expertise in air quality modeling and related applications to federal, state and local agencies, regional planning organizations, private research organizations and corporations, and international entities to address this critical health risk factor.

A flagship project at CEMPD is serving as the host of the EPA-funded Center for the Community Modeling and Analyses System (CMAS), in its 22nd year of operations to serve a global community of nearly 10,000 users.

The objective of research at UNC as part of ASCENT Project 19 is to continue developing tools that will enable quantification of National Airspace System-wide and airshed-specific air quality and health impacts due to aircraft emissions in select regions of the country. See more about this at: -of-aviation-air-quality-tools-for-airport-specific-impact-assessment-air-quality-modeling/

The objective of this research is to review, evaluate and refine the emissions inventories due to the oil and gas sector, and use a comprehensive modeling framework based on WRF-SMOKE-CMAQ modeling system to quantify the impacts of this sector on a nation-wide basis on both air quality and health.

The Transportation and Climate Initiative (TCI) is a regional collaboration of 12 Northeast and Mid-Atlantic states and the District of Columbia that seeks to improve transportation, develop the clean energy economy and reduce carbon emissions from the transportation sector. The participating states are: Connecticut, Delaware, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Vermont, and Virginia. Prior work has shown that focusing on health impacts and how reductions in emissions from transportation emissions can lead to health benefits will provide added value in emissions reductions strategies.

This study leverages the modeling platform created in support of the TCI (described above) to further assess range of transportation strategies, or complementary policies, that states may be considering beyond TCI. UNC previously performed CMAQ-DDM modeling at 1212-km resolution for a domain covering the Eastern US for a large combination of inputs including individual states and metropolitan areas, precursor emissions and vehicle classes to compute O3 and PM2.5 sensitivities. Further, several policy scenarios under the TCI were also modeled for the future year 2032 and compared against a no-TCI scenario.

Specific aim of this project is to perform CMAQ modeling where we include the effects due to increased load on the electrical grid from the deployment of electrical vehicles (EVs). Specifically, we would perform atmospheric modeling simulations using the CMAQ-DDM framework to assess the direct air pollution and health impacts of changes in electrical grids emissions, and assess how changes in electrical grid emissions interact with changes in transportation emissions to affect air quality and health.

We will use the Weather Research Forecast to use two approaches to downscale to 12km x 12km two IPCC global climate scenarios representing low and high predicted changes in climate (RCP 2.6 and RCP8.5) for 2001-2010 (as baseline) and for midcentury (2045-2055) to estimate the duration, magnitude, and frequency of the future heat waves. Scenarios of population and greenspace presence and configuration (size, concentration, and spatial distribution pattern), coupled with future heat wave events, will be used to estimate excess mortality by age and education.

Recent research has revealed that the combustion of wood and biomass for energy has a substantial, and underappreciated, impact on health. Despite regulations on fireplaces and wood stoves, the health impact of residential wood heating remains above 10,000 attributable deaths per year due to fine particle exposure. The impact of biomass use, especially in industry, has grown dramatically over the last decade, potentially due to its designation as a carbon-neutral fuel, and also has a public health burden of over 10,000 attributable deaths annually.

The health impacts of the use of wood and biomass for energy have been underappreciated, and as a consequence, understanding the magnitudes of emissions data has been neglected. We propose to review and compile existing data on biomass fuel use and emissions to build a nationwide emissions inventory for wood and biomass use that has emissions broken down by specific fuel type (firewood, wood pellets, agricultural waste, and others) and sector and use type (residential wood use in fireplaces and wood stoves, industrial use for energy, electricity generation, etc.).

The objective of this research is to use a reduced form dispersion tool (ZIP Code-Level Air Pollution Policy Assessment (ZAPPA) tool, which currently relies on dispersion estimates of Primary PM2.5 from C-TOOLS combined with fine scale health assessment (BenMAPR) to quantify the contribution of different classes of vehicles to air pollution health impacts and policy benefits across the city at a census tract scale. While ZAPPA can currently treat PM2.5 (primary from dispersion and secondary from reduced form approaches as used in COBRA and other reduced complexity models like EASIUR), we will enhance ZAPPA to account for dispersion of NOx and implement the NOx to NO2 conversion to provide estimates of changes in NO2 exposure.

Currently, ZAPPA uses the NEI 2016 v1 modeling platform-based inventories that are augmented with road network and activity data provided by the New York City Department of Health. While ZAPPA is nearly implemented for New York City, we will build ZAPPA for Atlanta as part of this study. We will rely on input datasets such as the road network and vehicular activity from the Atlanta Regional Commission to be able to support the fine-scale modeling.

Overall, this research will enable EPA-funded researchers and collaborators to integrate their per- and poly-fluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) exposure data by developing a database system and web-accessible tool to house harmonized (deidentified) environmental occurrence, questionnaire, and biomarker data from PFAS studies. This resource will promote secondary analysis of pooled PFAS exposure data, explore relationships between PFAS measured in multiple media including air, and facilitate development of exposure-based categories.

CEMPD is working with the National Park Service Air Resources Division to study the causes of haze and acid deposition in Rocky Mountain National Park. As a participant in the Rocky Mountain Atmospheric Nitrogen and Sulfur (RoMANS) study, we are furthering our understanding of the origins of emissions currently affecting ecosystems and visibility in the Rocky Mountain region of Colorado and exploring how emissions controls or reduction strategies can help mitigate pollution effects.

As the lead of the emissions modeling effort for the WRAP RMC, CEMPD supported regional haze SIP development for states in the Western U.S. We provided technical and regulatory guidance on emissions sources, data, and modeling systems to the WRAP states and tribes as they prepared regional haze SIPs.

Sponsored by: Western Regional Air Partnership (WRAP)

The Visualization Environment for Rich Data Interpretation (VERDI) tool is an open-source Java tool for visualizing the results from the Community Multi-scale Air Quality Model (CMAQ), associated programs and other environmental data. Learn more

The Spatial Allocator (SA) is a set of tools that helps users process and generate geospatial data files related to SMOKE emission, WRF meterology, and CMAQ air quality modeling. The tools are designed to compute surrogate files needed in SMOKE, BELD3 data for BEIS biogenic modeling, surf zone data needed in CMAQ sea salt emission estimate, and NLCD/MODIS land cover data for WRF/CMAQ land surface flux and depostion modeling. It also contains some simple geospatial data overlay and allocation processores which are generally used.

The Spatial Allocator (SA) is a set of tools that helps users manipulate and generate data files related to emissions and air quality modeling. The tools perform functions similar to Geographic Information Systems, but are provided to the modeling community free of charge. In addition, the tools are designed to support some of the unique aspects of the file formats used for Community Multiscale Air Quality (CMAQ) and Sparse Matrix Operator Kernel Emissions (SMOKE) modeling.

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