Grants and Fellowships | 2014

41 Post-Doctoral Fellowships Characterization of Urban to Neighborhood Scale Air Pollutant and Human Exposure using a Comprehensive Array of Fixed and Mobile Measurement Platforms The complex behavior of primary and secondary air pollutants is a major challenge when evaluating human exposure to air pollution. While primary pollutants vary in time and space by the heterogeneity of emission sources, secondary pollutants also depend on the non-linear reactions between the former and both depend heavily on meteorology. Moreover, in order to fully understand the effect of the mix of pollutants on human health a better understanding of the multiple constituents and their interrelations is needed. These challenges require the use of multiple sources of information regarding the spatio-temporal variability of air pollutants, including a variety of measurement methods and models. The Border Air Quality and Meteorology Study (BAQS-Met) field campaign examined the complexity of various processes in uencing summertime ozone levels in the southern Great Lakes region of North America. Results from the eld campaign were examined with respect to land-lake differences and local meteorology using a large array of ground-based measurements, aircraft data, and simulation results from a high resolution regional air quality model. Results show that the lakes act as a reservoir layer for ozone at night, which could cause elevated ozone levels over land during the day at the lake breeze flow. The Montreal mobile lab measurements campaign in 2009 examined the feasibility of deploying a heavily instrumented mobile lab for characterizing air pollutants’ spatial patterns and examined multi-pollutants’ concentrations and interrelationships at the intra-urban scale. Comparison of the mobile lab averages to the adjacent air quality monitoring network stations to evaluate their representativeness showed that they were in reasonable agreement with the annual averages at the monitoring sites. This comparison provided some evidence that, through the deployment approach, the mobile lab is able to capture the main features of the average spatial patterns. The findings also indicate that the multi-pollutant mix varies considerably throughout the city, both in time and in space, therefore no single pollutant can be a perfect proxy measure for the entire mix under all circumstances. However, based on overall average spatial correlations with the suite of pollutants measured, nitrogen oxide species appeared to be the best available indicators of spatial variation in exposure to the outdoor urban air pollutant mixture. Research publications (1) Levy, I., Makar, P.A., Sills, D.M.L., Zhang, J., Hayden, K.L., Mihele, C., Narayan, J., Moran, M.D., Sjostedt, S., & Brook, J.R. (2010). Unraveling the complex local-scale flows influencing ozone patterns in the southern Great Lakes of North America. Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics, 10 (22), 10895-10915. (2) Makar, P.A., Zhang, J., Gong, W., Stroud, C., Sills, D.M.L., Hayden, K.L., Brook, J.R., Levy, I., Mihele, C., Moran, M.D., Tarasick, D.W., He, H., & Plummer, D. (2010). Mass tracking for chemical analysis: The causes of ozone formation in southern Ontario during BAQS-Met 2007. Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics, 10 (22), 11151-11173. (3) Sills, D.M.L., Brook, J.R., Levy, I., Makar, P.A., Zhang, J., & Taylor, P.A. (2011). Lake breezes in the southern Great Lakes region and their influence during BAQS-Met 2007. Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics, 11 (15), 7955-7973. (4) Dayan, U., Tubi, A., & Levy, I. (2012). On the importance of synoptic classification methods with respect to environmental phenomena. International Journal of Climatology, 32 (5), 681-694. (5) Levy, I. (2013). A national day with near zero emissions and its effect on primary and secondary pollutants. Atmospheric Environment, 77 , 202–212. (6) Levy, I., Mihele, C., Lu, G., Narayan, J., & Brook, J.R. (2014). Evaluating multipollutant exposure and urban air quality: Pollutant interrelationships, neighborhood variability, and nitrogen dioxide as a proxy pollutant. Environmental Health Perspectives, 122 , 65-72. (7) Levy, I., Mihele, C., Lu, G., Narayan, J., Hilker, N., & Brook, J.R. (2014). Elucidating multipollutant exposure across a complex metropolitan area by systematic deployment of a mobile laboratory. Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics, 14 , 1-21. Fellow Ilan Levy Environment Canada Supervisor Jeffrey Brook 2008-2010