Department of Mechanical Engineering, Carnegie Mellon University, 5000 Forbes Avenue, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania 15213, United States.
Department of Engineering and Public Policy, Carnegie Mellon University, 5000 Forbes Avenue, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania 15213, United States.
Environ Sci Technol. 2023 Mar 7;57(9):3817-3824. doi: 10.1021/acs.est.2c06317. Epub 2023 Feb 21.
People of color disproportionately bear the health impacts of air pollution, making air quality a critical environmental justice issue. However, quantitative analysis of the disproportionate impacts of emissions is rarely done due to a lack of suitable models. Our work develops a high-resolution reduced-complexity model (EASIUR-HR) to evaluate the disproportionate impacts of ground-level primary PM emissions. Our approach combines a Gaussian plume model for near-source impacts of primary PM with a previously developed reduced-complexity model, EASIUR, to predict primary PM concentrations at a spatial resolution of 300 m across the contiguous United States. We find that low-resolution models underpredict important local spatial variation of air pollution exposure to primary PM emissions, potentially underestimating the contribution of these emissions to national inequality in PM exposure by more than a factor of 2. We apply EASIUR-HR to analyze the impacts of vehicle electrification on exposure disparities. While such a policy has small aggregate air quality impacts nationally, it reduces exposure disparity for race/ethnic minorities. Our high-resolution RCM for primary PM emissions (EASIUR-HR) is a new, publicly available tool to assess inequality in air pollution exposure across the United States.
有色人种不成比例地承受着空气污染的影响，使空气质量成为一个关键的环境正义问题。然而，由于缺乏合适的模型，很少对排放的不成比例影响进行定量分析。我们的工作开发了一种高分辨率简化模型 (EASIUR-HR)，以评估地面初级 PM 排放的不成比例影响。我们的方法将高斯烟羽模型用于初级 PM 的近源影响与之前开发的简化模型 EASIUR 相结合，以预测整个美国的空间分辨率为 300m 的初级 PM 浓度。我们发现，低分辨率模型低估了初级 PM 排放对空气污染暴露的重要局部空间变化，可能低估了这些排放对全国 PM 暴露不平等的贡献，超过 2 倍。我们应用 EASIUR-HR 来分析车辆电气化对暴露差异的影响。虽然这种政策对全国空气质量的总体影响较小，但它降低了种族/族裔少数群体的暴露差异。我们的初级 PM 排放高分辨率 RCM (EASIUR-HR) 是一种新的、公开可用的工具，可用于评估美国各地的空气污染暴露不平等。
