Impact of climate-responsive strategies on future air quality under climate change

Abstract

Air quality has been an important concern related to public health. In order to keep improving air quality under future conditions, additional challenges have been brought to the current and potential strategies due to a variety of potential global changes. This research investigates how U.S. air quality will be affected by climate change and climate adaptation strategies motivated by climate change. A broad range of topics is involved that address the impacts of anthropogenic land use change and emissions of atmospheric particles on urban and regional climate and air quality. These impacts constitute one of the largest sources of uncertainty in assessments of anthropogenic climate change overall. The thesis work falls into two categories in general. The first is to improve regional climate and air quality modeling from the following aspects: nudging approach for dynamic downscaling, sub-grid approach for Noah land surface model, and the coupling of aerosol emissions with clouds and the hydrological cycle in the regional model. The second category of work involves evaluation of the modeling frameworks and their applications, in order to study the impact on regional climate and air quality (especially in the southeastern USA) of important regional forcing, including land use/land cover (LULC) change and biomass burning. The applications of the above model frameworks include: (A) the impact of climate responsive strategies on future climate and air quality, (B) the impact of LULC on urban heat island and heat related death, and (C) the impact on regional climate and air quality of biomass burning aerosols owing to the direct effect and bulk property change of clouds, respectively.