Grants and Fellowships | 2014

44 Post-Doctoral Fellowships Assessing Temporally-and Spatially-Resolved PM 2.5 Exposures for Epidemiological Studies Using Satellite Aerosol Optical Depth Accurate assessment of exposure to environmental pollutants is essential for establishing a relation between exposure to a certain pollutant and its health effects. During the past few years we have developed a novel method to quantitatively model the relationship between PM 2.5 measurements and MODIS satellite AOD (aerosol optical depth) across the North Eastern USA during the years 2000-2012. With broad spatial coverage, satellite data now allow us to expand exposure data well beyond ground monitoring networks into rural and suburban areas with spatial resolution down to 1 km, which greatly enhances our ability to estimate subject-specific exposures. Our models perform extremely well with an out-of-sample tenfold cross-validated R2 of 0.88. Importantly, these R2 values are for daily, rather than monthly or yearly values. We clearly demonstrated that using our prediction models reduces exposure error, resulting in better exposure assignment and also demonstrated how AOD can be reliably used to predict PM 2.5 . Using similar methodology we developed models to estimate daily air temperature from satellite surface temperature at a high spatial resolution of 1 km. Once again we demonstrated how satellite data can be used reliably to estimate daily air temperature at high resolution in large geographical areas. These novel prediction models were later used in various health outcome studies. First, we used these daily PM 2.5 predictions to assign exposure to mortality cases in Massachusetts during the years 2000- 2008. Then we used our prediction models for a study of the association between PM 2.5 exposure during pregnancy and reduced birth weight in Massachusetts during the years 2000-2008. We then studied the effects of short and long term PM 2.5 exposure on hospital admissions across New-England during the years 2000-2006 and across the Mid-Atlantic states between 2000-2008. In all the above studies we found a significant association between exposure to PM 2.5 and negative health effects. Research publications (1) Kloog, I., Koutrakis, P., Coull, B.A., Lee, H.J., & Schwartz, J. (2011). Assessing temporally and spatially resolved PM 2.5 exposures for epidemiological studies using satellite aerosol optical depth measurements. Atmospheric Environment, 45 (35), 6267-6275. (2) Kloog, I., Chudnovsky, A., Koutrakis, P., & Schwartz, J. (2012). Temporal and spatial assessments of minimum air temperature using satellite surface temperature measurements in Massachusetts, USA. Science of the Total Environment, 432 , 85-92. (3) Kloog, I., Coull, B.A., Zanobetti, A., Koutrakis, P., & Schwartz, J.D. (2012). Acute and chronic effects of particles on hospital admissions in New-England. PLoS ONE, 7 (4), e34664. (4) Kloog, I., Melly, S.J., Ridgway, W.L., Coull, B.A., & Schwartz, J. (2012). Using new satellite based exposure methods to study the association between pregnancy PM 2.5 exposure, premature birth and birth weight in Massachusetts. Environmental Health, 11 (1), 40. (5) Kloog, I., Nordio, F., Coull, B.A., & Schwartz, J. (2012). Incorporating local land use regression and satellite aerosol optical depth in a hybrid model of spatiotemporal PM 2.5 exposures in the Mid-Atlantic states. Environmental Science & Technology, 46 (21), 11913-11921. (6) Chiu, YH.M., Coull, B.A., Sternthal, M.J., Kloog, I., Schwartz, J., Cohen, S., &Wright, R.J. (2013). Effects of prenatal community violence and ambient air pollution on childhood wheeze in an urban population. Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology, 133 (3), 713-722. (7) Kloog, I., Ridgway, B., Koutrakis, P., Coull, B.A., & Schwartz, J.D. (2013). Long- and short-term exposure to PM 2.5 and mortality. Epidemiology, 24 (4), 555-561. (8) Madrigano, J., Kloog, I., Goldberg, R., Coull, B.A., Mittleman, M.A., & Schwartz, J. (2013). Long-term exposure to PM 2.5 and incidence of acute myocardial infarction. Environmental Health Perspectives, 121 (2), 192. (9) Nordio, F., Kloog, I., Coull, B.A., Chudnovsky, A., Grillo, P., Bertazzi, P.A., Baccarelli, A.A., & Schwartz, J. (2013). Estimating spatio-temporal resolved PM 10 aerosol mass concentrations using MODIS satellite data and land use regression over Lombardy, Italy. Atmospheric Environment, 74 , 227-236. (10) Chudnovsky, A.A., Koutrakis, P., Kloog, I., Melly, S., Nordio, F., Lyapustin, A.,Wang,Y., & Schwartz, J. (2014). Fine particulate matter predictions using high resolution aerosol optical depth (AOD) retrievals. Atmospheric Environment, 89 , 189-198. (11) Fleisch, A.F., Gold, D.R., Rifas-Shiman, S.L., Koutrakis, P., Schwartz, J.D., Kloog, I., Melly, S., Coull, B.A., Zanobetti, A., & Gillman, M.W. (2014). Air pollution exposure and abnormal glucose tolerance during pregnancy: The project viva cohort. Environmental Health Perspectives, 122 (4), 378-383. (12) Kloog, I., Nordio, F., Zanobetti, A., Coull, B.A., Koutrakis, P., & Schwartz, J.D. (2014). Short term effects of particle exposure on hospital admissions in the Mid-Atlantic states: A population estimate. PloS ONE, 9 (2), e88578. Fellow Itai Kloog Harvard University, USA Supervisor Joel Schwartz 2010-2012