Project Description
This project aims to develop a suite of air quality products for societal applications, particularly in the assessment of the impacts of air pollution on public health and agriculture, based on a long term (14 years) high-resolution (12 km x 12 km) chemical reanalysis that is being developed at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR). New products and capabilities will be incorporated into an information dissemination website called HAPEN. New capabilities will include:
- Creating products and metrics for assessing the long-term impact of air pollution on public health, agriculture, and economy;
- Estimating the number of excess deaths attributable to PM2.5 and ozone;
- Quantifying air quality changes in unmonitored areas and benefits of emission control policies; and
- Developing a long-term dataset for high-resolution air quality studies.
Project Lead
Rajesh Kumar, PhD, Project Scientist III, University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR)
Rajesh Kumar is a project scientist III with the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), Boulder, Colorado, USA. His research focuses on air quality that is one of the most important socioeconomic and environmental concern around the world today. Air pollution is responsible for about 7 million premature deaths every year and loss of about 80-120 million ton of food. He synergistically integrates ground- and satellite-based air quality monitoring with atmospheric composition and modeling capabilities to address a number of air quality issues including transport and transformation of air pollution, the relative importance of local and foreign emissions, deterministic and probabilistic air quality predictions, aerosol-climate interactions, heterogeneous atmospheric chemistry, chemistry-climate interactions, projection of future air quality, impact of air quality for public health and food security, and interactions of air pollution with High Mountain Asia and its impact on downstream water resources. He has also developed a chemical reanalysis for the Contiguous United States (CONUS) by assimilating NASA satellite observations with the Community Multiscale Air Quality (CMAQ) model. This reanalysis is being used to generate a variety of air quality products for societal applications.
Additional Collaborators
Cenlin He, PhD, Project Scientist I, University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR)
Forrest Lacey, PhD, Project Scientist I, University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR)
Cassandra O’Lenick, PhD, Project Scientist I, University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR)
Matthew Casali, Associate Scientist II, University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR)
Gabriele Pfister, PhD, Senior Scientist/Interim Associate Director, University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR)
Olga Wilhelmi, PhD, Project Scientist IV, University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR)