Air Pollution Knows No Boundaries
presented by Yanina Barrera
How do atmospheric scientists understand air pollution in a city, when the air is constantly moving from state to state, and country to country? Answering this question is crucial for developing public health and environmental policy. By directly measuring air pollutants and combining information about the winds with a computer model, atmospheric scientists can better understand transport of urban air pollution. Atmospheric scientists develop models to generate high-resolution and time-resolved information about the atmosphere that we can’t easily measure everywhere and all the time. I will discuss how we use cutting-edge technology and models of winds and the atmosphere to understand the transport and sources of carbon dioxide emissions. In light of the recent Paris Climate Agreement, integrated modeling-data networks are important to improve monitoring, reporting, and verification of carbon dioxide emissions in cities around the world.