En colaboración con ChimSur Webinars

Air Pollution Exposure to PM2.5 and NO₂ is associated with hundreds and sometimes thousands of annual premature mortalities in megacities. Current air quality and health impact assessment tools provide county-wide estimates but are inadequate for assessing health benefits at neighborhood scales, especially for evaluating policy options related to energy efficiency or climate goals. This presentation introduces Tract-level Air Pollution Policy Assessment Tool for New York City (TRAPPA-NYC), a new high resolution web-based modeling tool that integrates two reduced-form modeling tools to models changes in emissions and associated air quality and monetized health risks at a census tract scale for New York City. This easy-to-use interactive tool empowers users to rapidly model specific policy scenarios and quantify health benefits in support of policy-making to protect public health, and supports modelling both PM2.5 and NO₂. Recent advances in the tool focusing on a better characterization of regional-scale transport, as well as on local-scale processes for NO₂ will be discussed, along with the application of specific policy scenarios for transportation and energy efficiency measures. We have also expanded this tool to other large cities, including Atlanta and Dallas Fort-Worth, and potential consideration for adapting this tool to other cities in South America will be discussed.

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Dr Arunachalam is Deputy Director and Research Professor with the UNC Institute for the Environment and UNC Gillings School of Public Health’s Department of Environmental Sciences and Engineering. He directs the EPA-funded Center for Community Modeling and Analyses System (CMAS) to provide modelling support for a global user community, and the U.S. DOT-funded Center of Excellence on Aviation Emissions to study aircraft emissions and their impacts on the environment. Dr Arunachalam’s interests and expertise are in emissions and multi-scale air quality modelling with a focus on atmospheric chemistry, source apportionment and health risk assessment. His work has been recognised by the U.S. EPA and U.S. DOT with multiple awards, and he is a U.S. nominee to multiple committees of the ICAO Committee on Aviation Environmental Protection (CAEP). He received his PhD in Chemical Engineering from Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey in 1998.