LADCO and AQAST: one regional air quality manager’s perspective Donna Kenski Lake Michigan Air Directors Consortium Houston AQAST Meeting, Jan 15-17, 2013
About LADCO Purpose: – provide technical assessments for and assistance to its member states on air quality; – provide a forum for its member states to discuss air quality issues. Focus is on ozone, fine particles, regional haze and their precursors Geographic focus is our member states and surrounding areas that impact them
Technical Support Schedule dictated by regulatory requirements Four components: – Emissions inventory development, – Photochemical modeling, – Data analysis, – Monitoring and special projects All work is done in collaboration with the states, via workgroups
Average Maximum Temperature Departure from Mean, June-A ugust 2013
Improving Inventories Inventory perspective : Mark Janssen Many studies have promised to improve inventories but often those promises do not connect with the products necessary to improve inventories. Products must have a clear path to integration with inventories. Researchers need to work with inventory developers to translate results into appropriate emission inventory inputs
Remote sensing can make it worse. Current NEI has “broken” satellite-based inventory for agricultural burning in Midwest. Analysis sees freshly plowed black Midwest soil and calls it new burn. 10% of Indiana ag land burning? EPA adopts national inventory, Midwest states now must wrestle those bad numbers out of NEI. 24,000 TPY PM25 Iowa Twice onroad/industrial COMBINED!
Issues, Challenges, Questions Need to speak the same language; satellite data streams are very rich but hard to translate into data that can be used to modify inventories. Tracey’s calls with AQ mgrs seems like a good start. Great AQAST progress on NOx point sources; can we distinguish or quantify NOx from cars versus trucks and onroad vs offroad? Agricultural ammonia (summer and winter) ; decreasing SOx and NOx make NH3 even more important. Organic carbon (worst model performance): – Refineries; many studies have shown inventories significantly underestimate VOCs from these and similar sources, including Lei Zhu yesterday – Temporal and spatial patterns of SOA formation – New oil and gas development (spatial, magnitude) – Residential wood combustion (spatial, temporal, magnitude) NOx disbenefit in urban areas; can it be seen in the satellite data? Visibility: Can satellite data help us quantify transport between states and across national borders or oceans, distinguish between natural and anthropogenic carbon sources Can satellite data improve meteorological model performance?
Regional Haze Boundary Waters: Incremental Probability of 20% Best/Worst Day Conditions
Mercury