Accounting for Land Use Changes in Projecting Future-Year Emissions Scenarios

Air quality modeling is performed at EPA for future-year time periods in support of regulatory analyses to assess the likelihood that areas will be in attainment with the National Ambient Air Quality Standards (NAAQS) after the application of proposed emissions controls. Typical years that are modeled include 2009, 2014, 2020, and 2030. Currently, changes in land use are not considered when the emissions for these future-year scenarios are generated. A premise of our research is that representing the impacts of land use changes on the geographic allocation of emissions may provide more realistic modeling results, especially in areas in which rapid development is underway. In this paper, we investigate using population and housing projections from the Integrated Climate and Land Use Change Scenarios (ICLUS) project, which includes outputs from the Spatially Explicit Regional Growth Model (SERGoM), to spatially allocate future-year emissions. We compare the results of this approach with a baseline set of emissions and present observations and preliminary conclusions regarding the utility of this approach for modeling applications involving different grid sizes