Talk by Ellis Robinson, UA CHEE: Mapping air pollutants at high spatial resolution: community exposure assessment using mobile monitoring and fast, in situ instrumentation

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AI Systems Monitoring Air Pollution

When

Noon – 12:50 p.m., Oct. 9, 2024
Weekly Seminar Format

Available in-person and via Zoom. Contact the department to subscribe to the email list (zoom link provided in announcement).

Abstract

Concentrations of air pollutants vary widely over a range of spatial scales – from within urban neighborhoods to country-level differences – based on a variety of factors. These include spatiotemporal variations in emissions, physical and chemical processing, meteorology, and topography, among others, all of which ultimately lead to differential exposure across populations, with repercussions for human health and environmental justice. Spatially-distributed measurements of air pollution are one way to assess these variations, and doing so aboard a mobile platform (aka “mobile monitoring”) is an increasingly popular means of evaluating population exposure. I will present a brief overview of mobile monitoring as a tool, and then describe two recent case studies that apply this tool to different contexts and research questions.

Case study #1 assessed spatial variability of particulate matter (PM) during the 2022 Alaska Layered Pollution and Chemical Analysis (ALPACA) campaign in Fairbanks, ALASKA. Fairbanks suffers from perennially poor wintertime air quality due to shallow surface-based inversions and strong local emissions sources. We used an ultra-portable, battery-operated, DIY mobile laboratory to quantify PM mass, particle number, and light-absorbing PM concentrations across Fairbanks. Case study #2 is a part of the the Hazardous Air Pollutant and Monitoring and Assessment Project (HAP-MAP) from the industrialized petrochemical corridor of southeastern Louisiana. Southeastern Louisiana is dense with industrial emissions sources along the Mississippi River corridor between Baton Rouge and New Orleans, many of which emit volatile organic compounds (VOCs) that are known carcinogens. We used a large suite of fast, in situ gas-phase instrumentation aboard a mobile laboratory to measure VOC mixing ratios across a wide (75 km) swath of the corridor. We present a spatial analysis of these concentrations, which form the basis of a cancer risk assessment. These results are compared against model estimated concentrations and cancer risk from the EPA’s Air Toxics Screening Assessment.

Bio

Ellis Robinson is a new (as of August 2024) assistant professor in Chemical & Environmental Engineering at the University of Arizona. He works on a variety of projects related to air pollution, which include aerosol composition measurements and source apportionment and characterization in both outdoor and indoor environments, hazardous pollutant mapping around fenceline communities impacted by heavy industry, and greenhouse gas flux measurements from natural gas infrastructure. These interests are motivated by their direct application to improving environmental and human health. Ellis earned a Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University in 2014, and a B.S. in Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering from The Ohio State University in 2009. Prior to joining the U of A, he worked as research engineer at Johns Hopkins University and a postdoctoral researcher at both the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and Carnegie Mellon University.

Contacts

Kim Wood, Weekly Colloquium Coordinator
Ellis Robinson