Getting the most from your AQUIS database for air emission inventories

During the early 1990s, air quality managers at Hill Air Force Base (Hill) in Ogden, Utah saw the number of emission sources they were required to track escalating rapidly to over. 1,200. They felt the only way to effectively manage the associated data was using an electronic system. The US Air Force Material Command had just developed the Air Quality Utility Information System (AQUIS), as a means of helping bases manage their air emission sources. As Hill experimented with the system, it became evident that the air quality staff did not have the time and resources to keep the system updated. Hill determined that if they hired a contractor to become intimately familiar with AQUIS, they could receive on-going support without constantly retraining new full-time staff and AQUIS could become a valuable tool in managing its emission sources. In this way, Hill was able to manage the effort, while placing the responsibility for a cost effective, quality product on dedicated specialists. The contractor was asked to: (1) to find an efficient, cost effective method for collecting and entering data into AQUIS; (2) to determine whether the AQUIS emission algorithms and factors were appropriate for all of Hill`s sources; (3) if AQUIS did not have the capability to calculate emissions for some sources, to change the system or prepare supplementary spreadsheets for future inventories, until AQUIS generated the appropriate emissions; (4) to figure out a flexible method for generating the needed information from AQUIS for in-house and regulatory reporting, and (5) coordinate these efforts with the system development contractor (Argonne National Laboratory (ANL)) to limit duplication of effort. This paper discusses some of the methods the contractor used to achieve the goals set by Hill. The reader will be introduced to some methods that go beyond what AQUIS is currently designed to do