The assessment of risks to human health associated with exposure to oxidant air pollutants has not received adequate attention despite the recognized public health threat posed by the ubiquitous presence of these compounds in the environment. In this article, research needs and uncertainties at each of the steps in the risk assessment of oxidant air pollutants are identified: hazard identificat...

INTRODUCTION The fundamental principle of source/receptor relationships is that mass conservation can be assumed and a mass balance analysis can be used to identify and apportion sources of airborne particulate matter in the atmosphere. This methodology has generally been referred to within the air pollution research community as receptor modeling [Hopke, 1985; 1991]. The approach to obtaining ...

People in the rural, communal areas of South Africa rely on live fuel wood for more than 90% of their energy requirements. Using airborne lidar from the Carnegie Airborne Observatory (CAO) we compared tree canopy cover and height distributions between communal landscapes with heavy utilization to fully protected public and private reserves in the Lowveld of South Africa. Rangelands and fields i...

8 High concentrations of airborne particulate matter in factories can cause serious health problems 9 for workers. One significant reason for these high concentrations is the poor performance of the 10 ventilation systems in workplaces. This investigation developed a strategy that combines 11 computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations and on-site measurements to study and improve 12 the ven...

This paper describes the work and results of the second phase of research sponsored by the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) initiated to study the relationship between traffic activity and ambient PM2.5 concentrations. The study, entitled “Estimating the Transportation Contribution to Particulate Matter Pollution”, had the objective of performing a correlation analyses on particulate matte...

Fine airborne particulate matter (PM2.5) has adverse effects on human health. Assessing the long-term effects of PM2.5 exposure on human health and ecology is often limited by a lack of reliable PM2.5 measurements. In Taipei, PM2.5 levels were not systematically measured until August, 2005. Due to the popularity of geographic information systems (GIS), the landuse regression method has been wid...

The observation and control of particulate matter (PM) pollution in ambient air is increasingly being recognized as an important topic in societies across the globe. Classic measurement approaches provide accurate daily means but are static, expensive and suffer from low spatial resolution and high latency. Distributed measurement grids using real-time capable instrumentation not only can provi...

Soil contains almost twice as much carbon (C) as the atmosphere and 5-15% of soil C is stored in a form of particulate organic matter (POM). Particulate organic matter C is regarded as one of the most labile components of the soil C, such that can be easily lost under right environmental settings. Conceptually, micro-environmental conditions are understood to be responsible for protection of so...