The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Atmospheric Modeling Division is engaged.pdfVIP

Advances in Emissions Modeling of Airborne Substances Thomas Pierce*, William Benjey*, Jason Ching*, Dale Gillette*, Alice Gilliland*, Shan He+, Michelle Mebust, and George Pouliot* Atmospheric Modeling Division/NERL Office of Research and Development U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Research Triangle Park, North Carolina 27711 Abstract The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Atmospheric Modeling Division is engaged in a number of research projects that are leading to advances in emissions modeling of airborne substances. Two of these projects, air quality forecast modeling and global climate change modeling, are presented in other papers at this conference. This paper briefly highlights advances in the following areas: (1) Ammonia emissions – development and application of an inversion technique for refining seasonal and annual estimates of ammonia (2) Biogenic emissions – development and integration of the third generation of the Biogenic Emissions Inventory System (BEIS3) (3) Fugitive dust emissions – development and testing of geographical databases and a dynamic algorithm for making episodic estimates of wind blown fugitive dust (4) Sea salt emissions – development of an algorithm for estimating emissions originating from oceans (5) SMOKE – support and refinements to the Sparse Matrix Operational Kernel Emissions (SMOKE) modeling system (6) Wildfire and prescribed burn emissions – collaboration with the National Park Service on development of the Community Smoke Emissions Model (CSEM) Introduction Since the 1950s, the primary mission of the Atmospheric Modeling Division has been to develop and evaluate air quality simulation models. While the Division has traditionally focused its research on the meteorological aspects of these models, this focus has expanded in recent years to include emission processors, a critical and often inaccurate component in air quality modeling. The need for emissions modeli