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Air Quality Management Plan

Tools and Resources

Information provided for informational purposes onlyNote: EPA no longer updates this information, but it may be useful as a reference or resource.

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Information Resources and Reports

  • The Multi-pollutant Report: Technical Concepts and Examples (PDF) (58pp, 2.5 MB) - This 2008 report focuses on multi-pollutant concepts as they relate to EPA's air quality management system. The purpose of this report is to facilitate a common understanding of multi-pollutant concepts to foster collaboration within and across the technical and policy disciplines of air quality management; explore multi-pollutant analytic issues; and illustrate the initial development and implementation of a technical infrastructure to support a multi-pollutant approach to air quality management.
  • Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative Exit EPA disclaimer - The Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, or RGGI, is a cooperative effort by Northeastern and Mid-Atlantic states to reduce carbon dioxide emissions.
  • South Coast 2007 AQMP Exit EPA disclaimer - Every three years, the California South Coast Air Quality Management District (AQMD) prepares an overall plan (AQMP) for the air quality improvement to be submitted for inclusion in the State Implementation Plan (SIP).
  • East-West Gateway Council of Governments Exit EPA disclaimer - East-West Gateway researches and promotes public investment and taxing policies that will lead to responsible growth and redevelopment in the St. Louis, MO-IL area.

Tools, Models and Databases

    Ambient Data Analysis Tools
  • AirNow - AirNOW is a website which provides air pollution data, ozone forecasting, information about public health and environmental effects of air pollution to the public.
  • Visibility Information Exchange Web System (VIEWS) Exit EPA disclaimer - VIEWS is an online exchange of air quality data, research, and ideas designed to understand the effects of air pollution on visibility and to support the Regional Haze Rule enacted by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to reduce regional haze and improve visibility in national parks and wilderness areas.
  • Air Trends: Special Studies - This page provides links to Special Studies topics describing policy-relevant information. These topics include analysis of Particulate Matter (PM) concentrations that will help policy makers understand sources of PM and its precursors, trends of carbon monoxide, ozone exceedances, and characterization of national spatial variation.
  • UNMIX - The EPA UNMIX model is a receptor model that unmixes the concentrations of chemical species measured in the ambient air to identify the contributing sources. Chemical profiles of the sources are not required, but instead are generated internally from the ambient data by UNMIX, using a mathematical formulation based on a form of factor analysis. For a given selection of species, UNMIX estimates the number of sources, the source compositions, and source contributions to each sample.
  • Positive Matrix Factorization (PMF) - The PMF technique is a form of factor analysis where the underlying co-variability of many variables (e.g., sample to sample variation in PM species) is described by a smaller set of factors (e.g., PM sources) to which the original variables are related. The structure of PMF permits maximum use of available data and better treatment of missing and below-detection-limit values.
    Control Measures Information, Databases, and Tools
  • AirControlNet - AirControlNet is a PC-based database tool for conducting pollutant emissions control strategy and costing analysis. AirControlNet contains a database of control measures and cost information for reducing the emissions of criteria pollutants (e.g., NOx, SO2, VOC, PM10, PM2.5, NH3) as well as CO and Hg from point (utility and non-utility), area, nonroad, and mobile sources.
  • Greenhouse Gas Equivalencies Calculator - This equivalency calculator may be useful in communicating your greenhouse gas reduction strategy, reduction targets, or other initiatives aimed at reducing GHG emissions.
  • Clean Energy Economics Models - EPA economics tools that help areas identify, design and implement clean energy policy and technology solutions.
    Emissions Inventory and Modeling Tools
  • Sparse Matrix Operator Kernel Emissions (SMOKE) Exit EPA disclaimer - SMOKE is an open source emissions processing system designed to create gridded, speciated, hourly emissions for input into a variety of air quality models such as CMAQ, REMSAD, CAMX and UAM. SMOKE supports area, biogenic, mobile (both onroad and nonroad), and point source emissions processing for criteria, particulate, and toxic pollutants. For biogenic emissions modeling, SMOKE uses the Biogenic Emission Inventory System, version 2.3 (BEIS2) and version 3.09 and 3.13 (BEIS3). SMOKE is also integrated with the on-road emissions model MOBILE6.
  • Emissions Modeling Framework (EMF) (PDF) (16pp, 212k) The EMF is a tool that makes it easier for the user to run SMOKE and other emissions modeling tools. The EMF supports multipollutant modeling of criteria and toxic pollutants and can interact with COST for control strategy development.
  • CONsolidated Community Emissions Processing Tool (CONCEPT) Exit EPA disclaimer - CONCEPT is an open source emissions processing system that includes modules for area source, point source, on-road motor vehicles, non-road motor vehicles and biogenic emissions. CONCEPT also has the ability to interface with traffic demand models to provide on-road, link-based motor vehicle emissions estimations.
  • NE-MARKAL Exit EPA disclaimer - MARKet ALlocation (MARKAL) is a data-rich analytical framework for examining energy policy options and their resultant impact on energy services in the region.
    Air Quality Models and Tools
  • Community Multi-scale Air Quality (CMAQ) Exit EPA disclaimer - The CMAQ model is a photochemical model that includes state-of-the-science capabilities for conducting urban to regional scale simulations of multiple air quality issues, including tropospheric ozone, fine particles, toxics, acid deposition, and visibility degradation.
  • Comprehensive Air quality Model with extensions (CAMx) Exit EPA disclaimer - The CAMx model is a photochemical model that simulates air quality over many geographic scales. The model treats a wide variety of inert and chemically active pollutants, including ozone, particulate matter, inorganic and organic PM2.5/PM10, and mercury and other toxics. CAMx also has plume-in-grid and source apportionment capabilities.
  • AERMOD Modeling System - AERMOD is EPAs preferred/recommended dispersion model . It is a steady-state plume model that incorporates air dispersion based on planetary boundary layer turbulence structure and scaling concepts, including treatment of both surface and elevated sources, and both simple and complex terrain.
  • Response Surface Model (RSM) (PDF) (48pp, 1.1 MB) - The RSM is based on a new approach known as air quality metamodeling that aggregates numerous pre-specified individual air quality modeling simulations into a multi-dimensional air quality response surface. The RSM approach allows for the rapid assessment of air quality impacts of different combinations of emissions reductions and was used to estimate air quality changes for various control scenarios for the proposed PM2.5 NAAQS.
  • Modeled Attainment Test Software (MATS) - MATS is a PC-based software tool that can perform the modeled attainment tests for particulate matter (PM2.5) and ozone (O3), and perform the uniform rate of progress analysis for regional haze (visibility).
    Environmental Indicator Tools
  • Benefits Mapping and Analysis Program (BenMAP) - BenMAP is a tool for estimating the health impacts, and associated economic values, ssociated with changes in ambient air pollution. It accomplishes this by running health impact functions, which relate a change in the concentration of a pollutant with a change in the incidence of a health endpoint.
  • Human Exposure Model-3 (HEM-3) - HEM-3 is is a streamlined but rigorous tool for estimating ambient concentrations, human exposures and health risks that may result from air pollution emissions. The HEM-3 provides ambient air concentrations, as surrogates for lifetime exposure, for use with unit risk estimates and inhalation reference concentrations to produce estimates of cancer risk and noncancer hazard, respectively, for the air toxics modeled.
  • Hazardous Air Pollutant Exposure Model (HAPEM), Version 6 - HAPEM6 is a screening-level exposure model appropriate for assessing average long-term inhalation exposures of the general population, or a specific sub-population, over spatial scales ranging from local to national. HAPEM6 uses the general approach of tracking representatives of specified demographic groups as they move among indoor and outdoor microenvironments.
  • Air Pollutants Exposure (APEX) Model, Version 4 - APEX is is the inhalation exposure component of EPAs overall Total Risk Integrated Methodology (TRIM), which is a time series modeling system with multimedia capabilities for assessing human health and ecological risks from hazardous and criteria air pollutants. APEX is a population-based, stochastic, microenvironmental model that can be used to estimate human exposures via inhalation for criteria and air toxics pollutants
  • MIRA - Multi-criteria Integrated Resource Assessment (MIRA) is an approach to environmental decision analysis that encompasses an analytical toolbox, which allows users to organize and rank decision criteria or indicators, link the data to the policy decision, weight the relative importance of the criteria in the decision hierarchy, and to develop new alternatives by testing the impacts of uncertainty and different preference weights.

 

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