Environmental, Water Resources, and Coastal Engineering Seminar Series

Fitts-Woolard Hall 3301

Modelling road transport emissions: a microscale point of view

Abstract: Road transport is often the main source of air pollution in urban areas worldwide. Many efforts have been aimed at reducing emissions from this sector achieving significant abatements. Nevertheless, emission reductions have been lower than expected due to the heavy growth of transport in the last decades. To estimate emissions from the road transport sector, there are several methods and approaches that are useful for different scales of analysis. To understand the spatial and temporal distribution of the emissions, typically, regional traffic emission models are used for the compilation of urban inventories, and usually, those are the most detailed data available at the city scale. This level of detail is not enough to understand the high pollutant concentrations that occur in specific urban highly polluted areas (hotspots). In recent years many actions have been undertaken to solve air quality problems in these traffic hotspots. But, to accurately understand the influence of these very local high concentrations on the real exposure of the population, there is a need to estimate the contribution of road traffic to atmospheric emissions in great detail (at microscale) for those areas. In this seminar, we will dive into the capabilities of currently available road traffic emission modeling tools as well as some practical applications of those tools to support emission analysis at the microscale level.

Biography: Christina Quaassdorff, PhD, is a visiting postdoctoral research scholar at NC State University coming from the Technical University of Madrid in Spain. She is a road traffic emission modeler that finished her Ph.D. in Environmental Engineering in 2018 with her dissertation about road traffic emissions modeling and air quality measures applied to Madrid in Spain. For two years, she worked on technical support for the Spanish Ministry for Ecological Transition in order to achieve the Spanish commitments to the European Union’s air pollution reduction goals for 2030. Now, she is collaborating with NCSU to estimate highly detailed road traffic emissions at city scale in the frame of an IRTEMS European Union grant.