Alper Unal

On average in the United States (US), low-income communities and communities of color face disproportionate burdens of air pollution and associated health impacts. Much of the effort to reduce these disparities will need to occur at the state level, through the targeting of specific emission sources and exposures. We present the first analysis of exposure disparities in the US that systematically investigates temporal trends, disaggregated by economic sector and state. Our approach combines a recently released time-series (2002 to 2019) emission inventory (EQUATES) with a computationally efficient air pollution model (InMAP Source-Receptor Matrix) to predict annual average exposure to ambient PM _2.5 in each census tract in the contiguous US, disaggregated by emission sector. We find that, in general, absolute disparities have decreased, but relative disparities remain largely unchanged. This pattern holds for some sectors (e.g., transportation and electricity) but not others (e.g., disparities are largely unchanged for agriculture emissions and are generally increasing for residential and cooking emissions). Some state-sector combinations exhibit distinct patterns (e.g., most-recent disparities in New York are dominated by cooking and in Florida by construction). Of all sectors, industrial emissions contribute the largest exposures and the greatest exposure disparities. Agriculture and residential energy use are also large contributors to most-recent disparities, underscoring that inequities persist in sectors historically subject to less regulatory focus. Overall, our findings reveal how disparities have changed during 2002 to 2019 for each sector-state combination and elucidate which sectors each state should focus on to address recent disparities.

Climate change and air pollution are two phenomena that can no longer be considered separately. Changes in climate also alter the effects of air pollution. For example, emissions of ammonia (NH3) and non-methane organic compounds (NMVOC), which are precursors of ozone (O3) and secondary particles (PM), are drastically sensitive to temperature and humidity changes. Moreover, the impacts of O3 and secondary PMs on the climate were previously investigated. The first step for air quality modeling studies is the modeling of meteorological fields. In this study, important meteorological parameters in terms of air pollution were obtained from global climate models for a historical and future periods (SSP585). Selected parameters will be corrected and downscaled to a high resolution for Eastern Mediterranean. Then, the bias-corrected and downscaled meteorology outputs will be used in other studies related to air quality.Countries in the Mediterranean Region are being affected significantly by the changing climate due to their location. Previously conducted studies evaluated the meteorological parameters of global climate models with low resolutions. Within the scope of this study, future estimates will be downscaled to a selected domain in Eastern Mediterranean with a spatial resolution of 4×4 km2 However, recent studies have argued that a bias-correction method should be implemented to the selected meteorological parameters prior to downscaling. In previous studies, CMIP simulation outputs were evaluated for Turkey with or without downscaling. There are also studies that biases between observation/reanalysis and GCM model data are calculated. However, according to our knowledge, evaluation of downscaled climate change scenarios in the Mediterranean Region using a bias-correction method has not been conducted yet. Here, a bias correction methodology (Xu et al. (2021)) was used, and an ensemble was generated by choosing appropriate global climate models which are compatible with reanalysis data for the selected region.Native global climate model simulation results and non-linear long-term global climate model simulation trends were evaluated as the preliminary investigation. The temperature means of the global climate models (GCMs) and ERA5 reanalysis data were compared globally and for the EMEP domain. Initial findings showed underestimation or overestimation for the same GCM depending on the selected study domain. This result highlights the importance of the selection of the model for the study domain for weather generation and the models to be chosen for the ensemble. After calculating the long-term non-linear trend, the standard deviations were calculated for the interannual variability for the GCM and ERA5. For the historical period (1979-2014), annual temperature means of BCC-CSM2-MR, CMCC-CM2-SR5, EC-EARTH3, EARTH3-Veg, FIO-ESM-2-0, and KIOST-ESM showed similarity between ERA5 (r2 > 0.70). Summer and fall months show mostly higher correlations compared to other seasons. 22 model ensemble global domain (EMEP Domain) temperature mean, minimum and maximum values were found as 7.62 (6.09), 7.18 (5.28), and 8.12oC (6.89oC), respectively. The values for reanalysis data are 7.95 (6.92), 7.57 (5.94), and 8.27 oC (7.87oC).

Günümüzde hava kalitesinin korunması ve izlenmesi için yürütülen çalışmalar ve yasal uygulamalar, çevre bilincinin yerleşmesi ile daha da önemli hale gelmiştir. Gelişen teknolojiler, alternatif yakıtlar, çevre dostu düzenlemeler ile hava kalitesinin iyileştirilmesi artık ülke politikalarında yer almaktadır. Hava kalitesinin korunması amacıyla kirletici parametrelerin hem kaynaktaki hem de dış ortamdaki sınır değerlerinin azaltılmasına yönelik çalışmalar ülkemizde yürütülmektedir. Hava kalitesinin iyileştirilmesine yönelik politika belirlenmesinde mevcut durum tespiti büyük önem taşımaktadır. Mevcut durumun doğru olarak tespit edilebilmesi ve temiz hava eylem planlarının hazırlanabilmesi için ulusal ölçekte, kaynaklarına göre hava kirleticilerinin emisyon envanterinin hesaplanması, ulusal ve uluslararası sorumluluklar gereği atmosfere verdiğimiz emisyonların belirli periyotlarda raporlanması gerekmektedir. Bu nedenle, emisyon envanterinin belirli formatlarda, kirlilik kaynaklarına ait bilgiler ve emisyon faktörleri kullanılarak hazırlanması gerekmektedir. Bu çalışmada, Marmara Bölgesi pilot bölge seçilerek Çevre ve Şehircilik Bakanlığı ile birlikte ülkemizde ilk defa ulusal emisyon envanteri geliştirilmesi projesi gerçekleştirilmiştir. Bu çalışmadaki noktasal kaynaklar için yapılan kısım bu makalede anlatılmış ve metal sektörüyle ilgili elde edilen sonuçlar verilmiştir.