NOTE TO JOURNALISTS: To access
contour maps of the daily ozone forecast, visit http://www.imaqs.uh.edu/ozone_forecast.htm.
JUST BREATHE: OZONE FORECASTER UNVEILED
AT UH, AVAILABLE VIA WEB
Air Quality Group Brings Relief to Public, Help to Texas with
New Tool
HOUSTON, Aug. 21, 2006 – People with asthma or other respiratory
problems can breathe a sigh of relief thanks to University of Houston
professors who have recently unveiled a forecasting system that
provides air quality data on ozone conditions.
With the intent to not only increase public awareness, but also
help Texas manage air quality issues, the Institute for Multi-dimensional
Air Quality Studies (IMAQS) at UH has been operating an air quality
forecasting system for a year that has been tested, fine-tuned and
now determined ready for public use. Over the course of this past
year, the system has been expanded and improved to serve the entire
eastern half of Texas, including the Houston and Dallas metropolitan
areas.
“Our ozone forecaster is more localized than others and goes
into further detail,” said Daewon Byun, director of IMAQS
and a professor in UH’s geosciences department. “For
instance, while the ozone conditions may be rated unhealthy in downtown
Houston on a given day, suburbs like Sugar Land and The Woodlands
may actually be experiencing a good day that still is safe for outdoor
activities in those specific areas. Other days, the opposite is
true with downtown-area ozone levels being lower than in certain
suburbs.”
By clicking on the local, regional or national maps at http://www.imaqs.uh.edu/ozone_forecast.htm,
the public can obtain a map view of daily maximum ozone levels color-coded
with the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) health alert index.
Also included are links to animations of a two-day forecast in one-hour
increments. These maps and animations can help individuals, especially
those with respiratory problems, plan their day’s outside
activities. The Web site is updated daily with the most recent 48-hour
local, regional and national forecasts, providing graphical analysis
of the onset, intensity, duration and area of poor air quality conditions
via access to hourly data from 165 East Texas air pollution monitors.
The near real-time hourly air pollution and meteorological data,
air quality indices and animations from 3-D simulations performed
by IMAQS use the EPA’s Community Multiscale Air Quality modeling
system co-developed by Byun in 1999 while at the EPA before coming
to UH.
Byun stresses that while the traditional ozone season lasts from
June through September, Houston suffers the consequences all year
long. In a related project, UH’s IMAQS is collaborating with
Winifred Hamilton, director of the Baylor College of Medicine’s
Environmental Health Section, who is using Byun’s air quality
data in the patient-care arena and in her work to increase public
awareness of the connection between health and the environment.
Accurate meteorological and photochemical modeling efforts are
essential to support the efforts for establishing the State Implementation
Plan by the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ), Byun
said. Houston currently is in severe noncompliance, experiencing
more than 30 days per year of high ozone conditions. The EPA’s
ozone standard allows just one day per year of such conditions,
and the Houston-Galveston-Brazoria area must meet these existing
standards by 2007 or risk losing highway funding, among other penalties.
“The air quality forecasting is made by the photochemical
air quality models that take data on both manmade and biogenic emission
values and meteorological inputs, coupled with descriptions of the
physical and chemical processes that occur in the atmosphere,”
Byun said. “We then mathematically and numerically process
the information to yield predictions of air pollutant concentrations
as a function of time and location.”
With funding from the EPA, TCEQ, Texas Environmental Research Consortium
and Houston Advanced Research Center, Byun has collaborated with
researchers at UH from the fields of geosciences, mathematics, computer
science and chemistry on a number of projects to build this ozone
forecasting system. The TCEQ also provides key emissions input and
technical assistance for the project.
Past IMAQS initiatives leading up to the success and unveiling of
this air quality tool include:
• photochemical modeling of ethylene and propylene emissions
from petrochemical factories to understand how these chemicals react
in the atmosphere to eventually form ozone,
• development of an air quality prediction system for studying
the impact of forest fires on regional air quality,
• studying the urban heat island phenomenon that engulfs a
city like Houston with hot air generated by the radiant heat emanating
from the many paved areas and buildings,
• and observing how changes in the urban environment affect
air pollution.
“Improving Houston’s air quality cannot begin without
the level of detail that Byun and his colleagues have put into this
research,” said Jack Casey, chair of UH’s geosciences
department in the College of Natural Sciences and Mathematics. “Developing
the ozone forecasting system and its continuous verification and
improvement with the help of regional chemical measurement programs
is an important first step in understanding Houston’s air
quality problem. Because of the smaller local grid spacing, the
Web site is better than any other state or national forecasting
Web site for ozone alerts in this region. With the release of these
forecasts on a daily basis, Byun and IMAQS are performing an important
service for the Houston and southeastern Texas community.”
About the University of Houston
The University of Houston, Texas’ premier metropolitan research
and teaching institution, is home to more than 40 research centers
and institutes and sponsors more than 300 partnerships with corporate,
civic and governmental entities. UH, the most diverse research university
in the country, stands at the forefront of education, research and
service with more than 35,000 students.
About the College of Natural Sciences and Mathematics
The UH College of Natural Sciences and Mathematics, with nearly
400 faculty members and approximately 4,000 students, offers bachelors,
masters and doctoral degrees in the natural sciences, computational
sciences and mathematics. Faculty members in the departments of
biology and biochemistry, chemistry, computer science, geosciences,
mathematics and physics have internationally recognized collaborative
research programs in association with UH interdisciplinary research
centers, Texas Medical Center institutions and national laboratories.
To receive UH science news via e-mail, visit www.uh.edu/admin/media/sciencelist.html.
For more information about UH visit the universitys Newsroom at www.uh.edu/admin/media/newsroom.
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