LADCO and AQAST: one regional air quality manager’s perspective

Donna KenskiLake 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

2002 2003 2004 2005

2006 2007 2008

2010 2011 2012

2009

Average Maximum Temperature Departure from Mean, June-August

2013

Improving InventoriesInventory 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 IowaTwice 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