Land use forecasting in regional air quality modeling

When estimating the impacts of air pollutant control measures on future air quality, it is typically presumed that land covers remain constant. However, changes in land cover can have an impact on air pollutant concentrations. This work develops and applies modeling methodologies for land cover and regional air quality interactions, using regions in and around central and eastern Texas as case studies. Changes in land cover considered in this work are driven by urban development and inter-annual variability in climate. Urbanization, associated with changes in biogenic emissions and air pollutant dry deposition, leads to changes in daily maximum ozone concentration, that range from - 0.94 to 0.12 ppb for the Austin area. In comparison, the effects of the same urban development led to changes in anthropogenic emissions that led to changes ranging from -7.0 to -1.3 ppb in ozone concentrations for the Austin area. Inter-annual variation in climate led much larger changes in daily maximum ozone concentrations than changes due to urbanization. Changes in daily maximum ozone concentrations, due to inter- annual variation in biogenic emissions associated with inter-annual variability in climate, ranged from -5.9 to 9.7 ppb for the Austin area and 0.0 to 18 ppb for the Houston area.