Air Quality Assessment Tools: a Guide for Public Health Practitioners
Air Quality Assessment Tools: A Guide for Public Health Practitioners Prabjit Barn, Peter Jackson, Natalie Suzuki, Tom Kosatsky, Derek Jennejohn, Sarah Henderson, Warren McCormick, Gail Millar, Earle Plain, Karla Poplawski, Eleanor Setton Summary • Several tools exist to assess local air quality, including the impact of specific sources, emissions, and meteorological conditions. • Information generated from the use of air quality assessment tools can inform decisions on permitting of emissions, industrial siting, and land use; all can impact local air quality, which in turn can influence air pollution related health effects of a population. • The five tools discussed in this guide (highlighted with case examples) address different components of air quality: o Emissions inventories are databases of air pollution sources and their emissions, which allow for the monitoring of pollution releases to the air; emissions inventories can feed into other tools, such as dispersion models. o Dispersion modeling uses data on emissions, meteorology, and topography to provide estimates of ambient pollutant concentrations at specific receptor sites. o Source apportionment helps to identify important sources in an area by using information on ambient pollutant levels. o Mobile monitoring, in contrast to traditional fixed site monitoring, allows for a better understanding of pollutant concentrations and their sources, both temporally and, very importantly, spatially; Data collected by mobile monitoring projects can feed into models, such as land-use regression. o Land use regression uses a combination of local information to provide the best estimates of ambient pollution in a specific area. • Health impact assessment is an example of direct application of information generated by air quality assessment tools, to understand the air quality related health impacts of a population.
[Show full text]