JUEVES 13/11 a las 13hs
*** Presencial: Aula 8/Seminarios (CIMA, Pab II, 2do piso) ***

High Resolution Air Quality and Health Risk Modeling of Air Pollution in a Large Megacity in the U.S.
Dr. Sarav Arunachalam (The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Estados Unidos)
En colaboración con ChimSur Webinars

Air Pollution Exposure to PM2.5and 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 the support of policy-making to protect public health and supports modeling both PM2.5 and NO2. Recent advances to the tool that focuses on better characterization of regional-scale transport as well as local-scale processes for NO2 will be discussed, along with 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.

Dr. Arunachalam, 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 modeling 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 modeling with a focus on atmospheric chemistry, source apportionment and health risk assessment. His work has been recognized by the U.S .EPA and U.S. DOT with multiple awards, and he is a U.S. nominee for multiple committees on the ICAO Committee on Aviation Environmental Protection (CAEP). He received his Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering from Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey in 1998.