Projecting Changes in Air Quality and Health Impacts Across the U.S. at 2050 and 2090 Using Multiple Scenarios
Abstract
Several published studies have found that for a given level of precursor pollutant emissions, climate change leads to higher concentrations of ground-level ozone over some continental regions, with resulting increases in ozone-attributable mortality. In those studies, increases in seasonal average ozone levels are often highly correlated with increases in average daily maximum temperatures. This work advances this field of research by applying a chemical transport model to two dynamically downscaled GCM simulations to examine changes in air quality due to climate change for two air pollutant emissions scenarios.
Twenty-first century simulations of a high warming scenario (Representative Concentration Pathway 8.5) by the NCAR/DOE CESM and NOAA GFDL CM3 global climate models are dynamically downscaled to 36 km using the Weather Research and Forecasting model. The downscaled fields are then used with the Community Multiscale Air Quality model to simulate air pollution levels in the conterminous United States for 11-year periods at the beginning, middle, and end of the 21st century. For each model and future period, changes in air quality due to changes in climate variables are analyzed for two different air pollutant emission scenarios. Changes in seasonal means of ozone and fine particulate matter (PM2.5) concentrations are presented, as well as differences in various percentiles of the ozone distribution, and the meteorological and chemical drivers of these changes are discussed. Finally, changes in ozone and PM2.5 are used to estimate changes in mortality attributable to air pollution across the U.S.- Publication:
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AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2018
- Bibcode:
- 2018AGUFMGH12A..11N
- Keywords:
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- 0230 Impacts of climate change: human health;
- GEOHEALTHDE: 0231 Impacts of climate change: agricultural health;
- GEOHEALTHDE: 0232 Impacts of climate change: ecosystem health;
- GEOHEALTHDE: 0240 Public health;
- GEOHEALTH