Climate‐based sensitivity of air quality to climate change scenarios for the southwestern United States

Wise, Erika K.

doi:10.1002/joc.1713

Cited by 32 publications

(22 citation statements)

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“…This study builds on an earlier analysis that had suggested that climate change could have little net effect on PM concentrations because the net effect of increased particle production rates with higher temperature and particle concentration reductions associated with greater volatility would cancel one another out (Aw and Kleeman 2003). An analysis of ozone and particulate matter concentrations in Arizona under changing climatic conditions predicted similar results-an increase in ozone concentrations, but uncertainty in the effect on PM (Wise 2009 …”

Section: Particulate Mattersupporting

confidence: 62%

Air quality planning in California’s changing climate

Bedsworth

2011

Climatic Change

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California is home to some of the worst air quality in the nation and ninety percent of the state's population lives in areas that are out of attainment with at least one of the National Ambient Air Quality Standards. Increasing temperatures associated with climate change will make meeting air quality standards more difficult. Under a changing climate, additional emission reductions will be needed to achieve clean air standards. These additional emission reductions and associated costs are called the "climate penalty." Air quality planning is the process of assessing the emission reductions needed to meet air quality standards and outlining the programs and policies that will be implemented to achieve these emission reductions. This paper reviews the challenges that a changing climate will pose for air quality planning in California and identifies opportunities for adaptation. While state air quality regulators in California are taking enormous strides to address global warming, less work is happening at the regional, air district level. Air districts are the agencies responsible for developing air quality improvement plans. An important first step for regional air quality regulators will be to quantify the climate penalty and understand their region's vulnerability to climate change. Limitations in regulatory authority could impede measures to improve preparedness. Regional agencies will likely need to look to state and federal agencies for additional emission reductions.

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Section: Particulate Mattersupporting

confidence: 62%

Air quality planning in California’s changing climate

Bedsworth

2011

Climatic Change

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“…SDSM has been widely applied in SD studies for both climate variables and air quality variables (Diaz-Nieto and Wilby, 2005;Dibike and Coulibaly, 2005;Khan et al, 2006;Wetterhall et al, 2006;Gachon and Dibike, 2007;Prudhomme and Davies, 2009;Wise, 2009;and others), and has been recommended by the Canadian Climate Impacts and Scenarios (CCIS) project (http://www.cics.uvic.ca).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Evaluation of two statistical downscaling models for daily precipitation over an arid basin in China

Liu

Charles

et al. 2011

Intl Journal of Climatology

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Two statistical downscaling (SD) models, the nonhomogeneous hidden Markov model (NHMM) and the statistical down-scaling model (SDSM), which have been widely applied and proved skillful in terms of downscaling precipitation, were evaluated based on observed daily precipitation over the Tarim River basin, an arid basin located in China. The evaluated metrics included residual functions, correlation analyses, probability density functions (PDFs) and distributions. Overall, both models exhibited stability with little model performance difference between the calibration and validation periods. There was little difference for model performance on dry-spell length (dsl) and wet-spell length (wsl) between NHMM and SDSM. NHMM showed skill in simulating wet-day precipitation amount (wpa), whilst SDSM performed relatively poorly on extreme values of wpa, especially for dry stations with annual precipitation lower than 200 mm. Both NHMM and SDSM captured the spatial distribution characteristics of precipitation for most of the stations, as 11 months had an at-station correlation coefficient being greater than 0.9 and 0.8 for NHMM and SDSM in calibration period. NHMM showed slightly better model performance than SDSM on simulating monthly precipitation, as the former was able to model precipitation well for all months, whereas the later was well only for certain months. SDSM was able to capture the inter-site correlation characteristics of observed series, whilst the NHMM multi-site simulation over estimated inter-site correlation. Both NHMM and SDSM had less skill downscaling annual series because of stochastic components in precipitation amounts modelling.

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“…Demuzere and van Lipzig (2010a) provide an overview of the many different approaches to statistical downscaling. These approaches are easily implemented, computationally inexpensive, and flexible, but are predicated on the assumption that the current climate statistical relationships between predictors and predictands will remain valid in a future climate, and the assumption of no change in emissions, transport or chemical formation processes (Demuzere and van Lipzig, 2010a, b;Timbal et al, 2009;Wise, 2009). In dynamical downscaling, global scale climate information at a coarse resolution is used to drive a higher resolution regional model which is run over a limited area, and may involve General Circulation Models (GCMs; resolution of a few hundreds of kilometers), global Chemical Transport Models (CTMs), Regional Climate Models (RCMs; resolution of a few tens of kilometres, simulating up to a single continent) and regional CTMs.…”

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confidence: 99%

“…The impact of future climate change on PM 2.5 is an emerging area of study (Liao et al, 2006Racherla and Adams, 2006;Tagaris et al, 2007Tagaris et al, , 2008Avise et al, 2009;Wise, 2009), with most studies reporting increases in aerosol species components or aerosol burden (cf. Liao et al, 2006).…”

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confidence: 99%

Projections of mid-century summer air-quality for North America: effects of changes in climate and precursor emissions

2012

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Abstract. Ten year simulations of North American current and future air-quality were carried out using a regional airquality model driven by a regional climate model, in turn driven by a general circulation model. Three separate summer scenarios were performed: a scenario representing the years 1997 to 2006, and two SRES A2 climate scenarios for the years 2041 to 2050. The first future climate scenario makes use of 2002 anthropogenic precursor emissions, and the second applied emissions scaling factors derived from the IPCC Representative Concentration Pathway 6 (RCP 6) scenario to estimate emissions for 2050 from existing 2020 projections. Ten-year averages of ozone and PM 2.5 at North American monitoring network stations were used to evaluate the model's current chemical climatology. The model was found to have a similar performance for ozone as when driven by an operational weather forecast model. The PM 2.5 predictions had larger negative biases, likely resulting from the absence of rainwater evaporation, and from sub-regional negative biases in the surface temperature fields, in the version of the climate model used here.The differences between the two future climate simulations and the current climate simulation were used to predict the changes to air-quality that might be expected in a future warmer climate, if anthropogenic precursor emissions remain constant at their current levels, versus if the RCP 6 emissions controls were adopted. Metrics of concentration, human health, and ecosystem damage were compared for the simulations. The scenario with future climate and current anthropogenic emissions resulted in worse air-quality than for current conditions -that is, the effect of climate-change alone, all other factors being similar, would be a worsening of air-quality. These effects are spatially inhomogeneous, with the magnitude and sign of the changes varying with region. The scenario with future climate and RCP 6 emissions for 2050 resulted in an improved air-quality, with decreases in key pollutant concentrations, in acute human mortality associated with air-pollution, and in sulphur and ozone deposition to the ecosystem. The positive outcomes of the RCP 6 emissions reductions were found to be of greater magnitude than the negative outcomes of climate change alone. The RCP 6 scenario however resulted in an increase in the deposition of nitrogen, as a result of increased ammonia emissions expected in that scenario, compared to current ammonia emissions levels.The results of the study raise the possibility that simultaneous reductions of greenhouse gases and air pollution precursors may further reduce air pollution levels, with the added benefits of an immediate reduction in the impacts of air pollution on human and ecosystem health. Further scenarios to investigate this possibility are therefore recommended.

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Climate‐based sensitivity of air quality to climate change scenarios for the southwestern United States

Cited by 32 publications

References 31 publications

Air quality planning in California’s changing climate

Air quality planning in California’s changing climate

Evaluation of two statistical downscaling models for daily precipitation over an arid basin in China

Projections of mid-century summer air-quality for North America: effects of changes in climate and precursor emissions

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