We research the interrelationships between air quality, climate change, public health, and environmental policy. We use multi-disciplinary methods, drawing from epidemiology, exposure science, remote sensing, atmospheric chemistry and meteorology, numerical modeling, and economics.
Current projects:
Assessing environmental justice, air quality, and health co-benefits of transport interventions in U.S. urban areas
- Sponsor: NASA
- Objective: Use a community-engaged research approach to model air quality, environmental justice, and health benefits resulting from emission reductions in major metropolitan areas of the U.S. Emission reductions will be achieved by reductions in traffic activity and/or emissions, specifically by targeting different types of vehicles (light versus heavy-duty) and different spatial scales (citywide versus targeted at local overburdened communities).
Pushing the boundaries of fine-scale NOx emission quantification from remote sensing instruments
- Sponsor: NASA
- Objective: Combine aircraft and satellite observations with high resolution models to evaluate the capabilities of current and future remote sensing instruments to quantify urban NOx emissions
Climate, Economics and Health: Adding air quality impacts into social cost of carbon estimates
- Sponsor: Wellcome Trust (subaward from NYU)
- Objective: Incorporate changes in air quality, and its associated health impacts, into estimates of the social cost of greenhouse used by federal policymakers in the US and Germany
Health impact equity of climate change mitigation
- Sponsor: Natural Resources Defense Council
- Objective: Develop approaches for integrating health risk and equity into analyses of climate change mitigation actions.
Source-sector NOx emissions analysis with sub-kilometer airborne observations in Houston during TRACER-AQ
- Sponsor: Texas Air Quality Research Program (AQRP)
- Objective: Use sub-kilometer observations from the NASA GCAS airborne spectrometer jointly with a high-spatial resolution (~500 m) chemical transport model to better understand the NOx emission rates in the Houston metropolitan area
Value of GeoXO atmospheric composition data for estimating air pollution-related health impacts
- Sponsor: NOAA
- Objective: evaluate the influence of remote sensing capabilities for assessing air pollution-related health impacts that may be possible with GeoXO.
Using satellite NO2 observations for public health surveillance and environmental policy planning at global, national, and urban scales
- Sponsor: NASA Health and Air Quality Applied Sciences Team
- Objective: Meet stakeholder needs for tracking NO2 concentrations and disease burdens and NOx emissions at multiple spatial scales: global, national, and urban
Data-driven forecasts of hazardous air quality events over North America
- Sponsor: NASA Health and Air Quality Applied Sciences Team (subaward from George Mason University)
- Objective: Improve our collective predictability of dust, wildfire, and other hazardous air quality events through emission data assimilation and multi-model ensemble forecasting, in order to mitigate harmful effects on human health and the economy.
ACRoBEAR Arctic Community Resilience to Boreal Environmental change: Assessing Risks from fire and disease
- Sponsor: Belmont Forum
- Objective: Despite the Arctic being the most rapidly warming area on Earth, so far no estimates exist of how the extensive changes in temperature and rainfall have already led to changes in fire-related air quality risk and natural-focal disease (NFD) risk to northern community health, and their interactions. Moreover, there is little knowledge of how climatic, social and governance factors combine, and likely result in different degrees of resilience and mitigation potential to these risks across different regions of the northern high latitudes. ACRoBEAR aims to address these knowledge deficiencies to produce robust pan-Arctic predictions of fire air quality and NFD risk under future climate and development scenarios, based on new knowledge of both underlying science and community perceptions and understanding.
Using remote sensing and Earth system models to improve air quality and public health in megacities
- Sponsor: NASA Health and Air Quality program
- Objective: To meet the needs of international organizations to assess air pollution health impacts and mitigation benefits in cities, leveraging the global coverage and fine spatial resolution from remote sensing, combined with Earth systems models.