Bok Haeng Baek, Research Scientist in Mason's Center for Spatial Information Science and Systems (CSISS), is collaborating with researchers from several other institutions on a project addressing two emission issues: anthropogenic emission updates and wildfires.
Along with Co-Principal Investigator Daniel Tong, an Associate Professor of Atmospheric, Oceanic and Earth Sciences at Mason; Shobha Kondragunta, Satellite Calibration and Data Assimilation Branch Research Scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration; Xiaoyang Zhang, Co-Director of the Geospatial Sciences Center of Excellence, Professor, and Senior Research Scientist at South Dakota State University; Gregory Frost, Supervisory Research Chemist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Chemical Sciences Laboratory (CSL) in Boulder, Colorado; Alison Eyth, an Environmental Engineer at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA); George Pouliot, a Physical Scientist at EPA, and Christian Hogrefe, a Research Physical Scientist in the EPA's National Exposure Research Laboratory, Baek will use the National Air Quality Forecast Capability Community Emission Testbed to solve these problems.
First, the researchers will deploy state of the art emission modeling frames, including the ARL emission forecasting system and EPA/UNC emission modeling framework (EMF) to the GeoBrain cloud server.
Second, they will use NCET to: 1) generate NEI 2017 based anthropogenic emissions; 2) test the effects of meteorology-emission coupling; 3) project NEI 2017 mobile emissions into forecast year with ESRL/CSD Fuel-based Inventory for Vehicle Emissions; and 4) Incorporate NESDIS Blended Global Biomass Burning Emissions Product (GBBEPx) for dynamic wildfire emissions.
Third, they will evaluate the Community Multiscale Air Quality (CMAQ) model performance after an incremental update to choose preferable emission configurations that lead to improved O3 and PM2.5 forecasts.
Finally, they will use the optimal configuration to generate new emission data to be tested with NOAA in-house systems, and provide recommended dataset to NAQFC for operational runs.
This project is important because, via this work, the researchers will improve spatial and temporal estimates of anthropogenic and natural emissions (including wildfire smoke) through the use of NOAA satellite remote sensing and other data sources.
Baek received $87,771 from NOAA for this project. Funding began in April 2021 and will end in July 2022.
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