Abstract
Modeling Air Quality in the Las Vegas Region Track: Climate, Weather and Atmosphere Author(s): James Kuiper, Michael Lazaro, Young-Soo Chang, Michael Lazaro, Young-Soo Chang, Veerabhadra Kotamarthi The region around Las Vegas has been designated a PM10 nonattainment area by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), with large contributions coming from dust storms or strong urban valley winds. A major focus of our Air Quality Impact Assessment for the region was using GIS to spatially and temporally allocate gridded model windblown dust emissions and to visualize the spatial distribution of these emissions. These and other multisource/multipollutant emission parameters, and weather data from a Mesoscale Meteorological (MM5) model were used in the Community Multiscale Air Quality modeling system to identify and characterize arid urban valley air pollution episodes. Other GIS challenges were devising methods to efficiently transfer data into and out of the model, analyzing large model output files to generate statistics, and visualizing and communicating model results. The model simulation results are being used to support land disposition management decisions in the Las Vegas Valley. James Kuiper Argonne National Laboratory Environmental Science Division Building 900 9700 S. Cass Ave. Argonne , IL 60439-4832 US Phone: 630-252-6206 Fax: 630-252-3611 E-mail: jkuiper@anl.gov Michael Lazaro Argonne National Laboratory Environmental Science Division 9700 S. Cass Ave. Argonne , IL 60439-4832 US Phone: 630-252-3447 E-mail: mlazaro@anl.gov Young-Soo Chang Argonne National Laboratory Environmental Science Division 9700 S. Cass Ave. Argonne , IL 60439-4832 US Phone: 630-252-4076 E-mail: changy@anl.gov Michael Lazaro Argonne National Laboratory Environmental Science Division 9700 S. Cass Ave. Argonne , IL 60439-4832 US Phone: 630-252-3447 E-mail: mlazaro@anl.gov Young-Soo Chang Argonne National Laboratory Environmental Science Division 9700 S. Cass Ave. Argonne , IL 60439-4832 US Phone: 630-252-4076 E-mail: changy@anl.gov Veerabhadra Kotamarthi Argonne National Laboratory Environmental Science Division 9700 S. Cass Ave. Argonne , IL 60439-4832 US Phone: 630-252-7164 E-mail: vrkotamarthi@anl.gov |
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