Development of an integrated policy making tool for assessing air quality and human health benefits of air pollution control

Efficient air quality management is critical to protect public health from the adverse impacts of air pollution. To evaluate the effectiveness of air pollution control strategies, the US Environmental Protection Agency （US EPA） has developed the Software for Model Attainment Test-Community Edition （SMAT-CE） to assess the air quality attainment of emission reductions, and the Environmental Benefits Mapping and Analysis Program- Community Edition （BenMAP-CE） to evaluate the health and economic benefits of air quality improvement respectively. Since scientific decision-making requires timely and coherent information, developing the linkage between SMAT-CE and BenMAP-CE into an integrated assessment platform is desirable. To address this need, a new module linking SMAT-CE to BenMAP-CE has been developed and tested. The new module streamlines the assessment of air quality and human health benefits for a proposed air pollution control strategy. It also implements an optimized data gridding algorithm which significantly enhances the computational efficiency without compro- mising accuracy. The performance of the integrated software package is demonstrated through a case study that evaluates the air quality and associated economic benefits of a national-level control strategy of PM2.5. The results of the case study show that the proposed emission reduction reduces the number of nonattainment sites from 379 to 25 based on the US National Ambient Air Quality Standards, leading to more than USS334billion ofeconomic benefits annually from improved public health. The integration of the science-based software tools in this study enhances the efficiency of developing effective and optimized emission control strategies for policy makers.

Evaluation of health benefit using Ben MAP-CE with an integrated scheme of model and monitor data during Guangzhou Asian Games

Guangzhou is the capital and largest city（land area：7287 km2）of Guangdong province in South China.The air quality in Guangzhou typically worsens in November due to unfavorable meteorological conditions for pollutant dispersion.During the Guangzhou Asian Games in November 2010,the Guangzhou government carried out a number of emission control measures that significantly improved the air quality.In this paper,we estimated the acute health outcome changes related to the air quality improvement during the 2010 Guangzhou Asian Games using a next-generation,fully-integrated assessment system for air quality and health benefits.This advanced system generates air quality data by fusing model and monitoring data instead of using monitoring data alone,which provides more reliable results.The air quality estimates retain the spatial distribution of model results while calibrating the value with observations.The results show that the mean PM2.5concentration in November 2010 decreased by 3.5μg/m^3 compared to that in 2009 due to the emission control measures.From the analysis,we estimate that the air quality improvement avoided 106 premature deaths,1869 cases of hospital admission,and 20,026 cases of outpatient visits.The overall cost benefit of the improved air quality is estimated to be 165 million CNY,with the avoided premature death contributing 90%of this figure.The research demonstrates that Ben MAP-CE is capable of assessing the health and cost benefits of air pollution control for sound policy making.

Design and demonstration of a next-generation air quality attainment assessment system for PM_(2.5)and O_3

Due to the increasingly stringent standards, it is important to assess whether the proposed emission reduction will result in ambient concentrations that meet the standards. The Software for Model Attainment Test-Community Edition （SMAT-CE） is developed for demonstrating attainment of air quality standards of O3 and PM2.5. SMAT-CE improves computational efficiency and provides a number of advanced visualization and analytical functionalities on an integrated GIS platform. SMAT-CE incorporates historical measurements of air quality parameters and simulated air pollutant concentrations under a number of emission inventory scenarios to project the level of compliance to air quality standards in a targeted future year. An application case study of the software based on the U.S. National Ambient Air Quality Standards （NAAQS） shows that SMAT-CE is capable of demonstrating the air quality attainment of annual PM2.5 and 8-hour O3 for a proposed emission control policy.

Development and case study of a science-based software platform to support policy making on air quality

This article describes the development and implementations of a novel software platform that supports real-time, science-based policy making on air quality through a user-friendly interface. The software, RSM-VAT, uses a response surface modeling（RSM） methodology and serves as a visualization and analysis tool（VAT） for three-dimensional air quality data obtained by atmospheric models. The software features a number of powerful and intuitive data visualization functions for illustrating the complex nonlinear relationship between emission reductions and air quality benefits. The case study of contiguous U.S.demonstrates that the enhanced RSM-VAT is capable of reproducing the air quality model results with Normalized Mean Bias 〈 2% and assisting in air quality policy making in near real time.

A case study of development and application of a streamlined control and response modeling system for PM_(2.5)attainment assessment in China

This article describes the development and application of a streamlined air control and response modeling system with a novel response surface modeling-linear coupled fitting method and a new module to provide streamlined model data for PM_（2.5） attainment assessment in China.This method is capable of significantly reducing the dimensions required to establish a response surface model,as well as capturing more realistic response of PM_（2.5） to emission changes with a limited number of model simulations.The newly developed module establishes a data link between the system and the Software for Model Attainment Test—Community Edition（SMAT-CE）,and has the ability to rapidly provide model responses to emission control scenarios for SMAT-CE using a simple interface.The performance of this streamlined system is demonstrated through a case study of the Yangtze River Delta（YRD） in China.Our results show that this system is capable of reproducing the Community Multi-Scale Air Quality（CMAQ） model simulation results with maximum mean normalized error 〈 3.5%.It is also demonstrated that primary emissions make a major contribution to ambient levels of PM_（2.5） in January and August（e.g.,more than50%contributed by primary emissions in Shanghai）,and Shanghai needs to have regional emission control both locally and in its neighboring provinces to meet China＇s annual PM_（2.5）National Ambient Air Quality Standard.The streamlined system provides a real-time control/response assessment to identify the contributions of major emission sources to ambient PM_（2.5）（and potentially O_3 as well） and streamline air quality data for SMAT-CE to perform attainment assessments.