CAREER: Ground-truthing Ozone and Particulate Matter Sensitivities to Emissions Trends

这项研究将把美国最近的减排努力视为排放扰动的真实世界实验，开发创新技术，以事实证明污染物对排放趋势的敏感性。将推广和应用具有四维数据同化的迭代反模拟方法，以量化长期排放趋势，并评估臭氧和颗粒物对这些趋势的响应。反向建模将确定导致灵敏度不确定的主要因素，并调查潜在的调整以提高光化学建模的准确性。科学调查和环境决策依赖于环境模型，不仅可以准确模拟污染物浓度，还可以模拟其对排放的敏感性。对于臭氧和PM等空气污染物来说，模拟敏感性尤其具有挑战性，这些污染物对多种前体排放表现出非线性和高度可变的响应。虽然模型通常会根据污染物浓度的观测结果进行评估，但人们对无法直接观察到的污染物敏感性的准确性知之甚少。广泛的影响将包括一项教育计划，该计划将让大量五年级学生参与关于气象学和空气污染的动手、探究式学习。学生们将提出假设并进行实际测量，以调查学校校园的天气和污染状况是如何变化的。教学计划将在一所试点学校制定和实施，然后用于培训来自休斯顿地区的教师，让他们在自己的校园教授科学环境调查。首席调查员还将通过垂直整合的研究经验以及新课程和讨论会的开发，让本科生和研究生参与科学学习和研究。

The research will consider recent abatement efforts in the United States as a real-world experiment in emissions perturbations, developing innovative techniques to ground-truth pollutant sensitivities to emissions trends. An iterative inverse modeling method with four-dimensional data assimilation will be extended and applied to quantify long-term emissions trends and to evaluate ozone and particulate matter (PM) responsiveness to those trends. The inverse modeling will identify leading contributors to uncertainty in sensitivities and investigate potential adjustments to improve the accuracy of photochemical modeling. Scientific investigations and environmental decision-making rely on environmental models to accurately simulate not only pollutant concentrations but also their sensitivities to emissions. Simulating sensitivities is especially challenging for air pollutants such as ozone and PM that exhibit nonlinear and highly variable responses to multiple precursor emissions. Whereas models are routinely evaluated against observations for pollutant concentrations, much less is known about the accuracy of pollutant sensitivities that cannot be directly observed.Broader impacts will include an education plan that will engage a significant number of fifth-grade students in hands-on, inquiry-based learning about meteorology and air pollution. Students will develop hypotheses and conduct hands-on measurements to investigate how weather and pollutant conditions vary on their school campuses. Lesson plans will be developed and implemented at a pilot school and then used to train teachers from across the Houston region to teach scientific environmental inquiry at their own campuses. The principal investigator will also engage undergraduate and graduate students in scientific learning and research through vertically-integrated research experiences and the development of new curriculum and colloquia.