Cutting emissions pays for itself: published in Nature Climate Change

Our paper on the air pollution co-benefits from U.S. climate change policy was published yesterday in Nature Climate Change. Congrats to lead author (former Selingroup postdoc) Tammy Thompson and graduate student Rebecca Saari, as well as collaborator Sebastian Rausch (formerly research scientist in the MIT Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change, now at ETH Zurich). See the MIT News story here: Study: Cutting emissions pays for itself | MIT News Office.

New paper on PAH, SOA and BC out in ES&T

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Our new paper, "Assessing the Influence of Secondary Organic versus Primary Carbonaceous Aerosols on Long-Range Atmospheric Polycyclic Aromatic Hydrocarbon Transport," is now out in ES&T. We tested the hypothesis that PAHs are trapped in secondary organic aerosol upon emission, facilitating long-range transport. We found that this process failed to reproduce measurement constraints; instead, a trapping mechanism in which black carbon played a role was more likely. Details can be found at http://pubs.acs.org/doi/full/10.1021/es405219r.

Paper on model resolution for health impacts analysis published in ACP

Our paper assessing the optimal air quality model resolution for health impacts assessment is now out in Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics. Our major conclusion was that for human health benefits associated with decreases in ozone and PM2.5 together, the benefits calculated at 36 km resolution agree, within errors, with the benefits calculated using fine (12 km or finer) resolution modeling when using the current methodology for assessing policy decisions. This is because changes in PM2.5 dominate the human health impacts, and there is large uncertainty associated with human health response to changes in air pollution.

To read the paper, see the abstract and pdf.

Paper on PAH transport to the Arctic under future climate published in ES&T

Our new paper on future PAH transport to the Arctic is now officially out in ES&T (Friedman et al., 2014). We looked at how 2000-2050 emissions and climate changes affected PAH transport to the Arctic, and found that anthropogenic emissions changes dominated the influence of climate chnages. However, we identified a small "climate penalty" for volatile PAHs and a "climate benefit" for particle-bound PAHs. We used this to suggest that the ratios of more to less volatile species could potentially be used to diagnose signals of climate vs. emissions in the Arctic. 

To read the paper, see the journal site or pdf.