State-level Air Quality Implementation Plan

Team Members: Wei Peng (Princeton), Ken Davis (Penn State)

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To meet our air quality standards, state agencies rely on state implementation plans to come up with reasonable emission reduction targets to meet air quality standards. These implementation plans are a result of advanced modeling tools that represent local atmospheric chemistry and weather conditions, which is why inaccurate modeling methods/tools can have detrimental effects on human and environmental health. A team of Penn State researchers are working on a $1 million project funded by NASA to improve the accuracy and quality of data used in numerical models used for state implementation plans.

 

To improve the accuracy of these models, Penn State researchers will incorporate NASA land surface data to better take atmospheric turbulence and atmospheric mixing. The team will compare the NASA modeling system with state models to see which models best represent these complex interactions with air pollutants and local geographic characteristics.