Air Quality Modeling at Neighborhood Scales to Improve Human Exposure Assessment

摘要

Air quality modeling is an integral component of risk assessment and ofsubsequent development of effective and efficient management of air quality. Urban areas introduce of fresh sources of pollutants into regional background producing significant spatial variability of the concentration fields and corresponding human exposures. Typically, air pollutant concentration data in urban areas used by exposure models are from central site monitors that provide limited or no information on spatial variability. This paper describes a methodology for bridging air quality dispersion modeling and exposure approaches to provide a basis for assessing the impacts of such concentration variation on human exposures. For this approach the Models-3 Community Multiscale Air Quality Modeling System (CMAQ) (Byun and Ching, 1999) spatial resolution was refined from 4km to 1.33 km. This preliminary sensitivity study will illustrate human exposure to several pollutants as a function of these grid sizes. The approach sets the stage for the modeling of exposure to air toxics.