Applications in GIS

GIS in Air Quality Modeling

GIS is used as an essential tool for development of gridded emissions for atmospheric modeling. The emissions inventory is spatially and temporally preprocessed for chemical transport modeling as gridded input using emission processing models such as SMOKE and EPS2. The Center uses GIS to accurately allocate the emissions into corresponding grids using surrogates for each source. The Center also utilizes GIS to visualize results from chemical transport modeling and mesoscale meteorological modeling using krigging technique for finer grid resolution.

GIS in Data Management System

GIS web-application (ArcIMS) is used for a dynamic web-based GIS tools to display monitoring site locations, emissions, and land features and to interface between database and data retrieval systems. This tool provides a map with zoom in/out function, various high-resolution geographical layers such as major highway and power plants. And it also provides capabilities for multiple site selection, highlighting selected sites, and zoom to selected sites.

GIS in Data Analysis

The Center uses GIS to visualize pollutants and meteorological data collected at monitoring sites to analyze spatial distribution of pollutants. Spatial interpolation is used for estimating pollutant concentration at unsampled locations within the area covered by existing observations. GIS is also used for backward trajectory analysis, source apportionment and identification of possible source regions.

GIS in Health Risk Assessment

GIS is employed to spatially model exposure concentrations and to control for confounding factors in epidemiological studies. GIS provides insight into the spatial and temporal trends and variability of health outcomes, PM2.5 components and other explanatory variables in preparation for source apportionment and the use of effects modeling techniques.