Share icon
Acquiring, organizing, and analyzing the datasets necessary for planners to thoroughly evaluate air quality and accurately trace emissions sources is a laborious and costly process that strains already-limited state and federal resources. Even after such data have been consolidated and analyzed, employing them synergistically to design effective emissions control strategies is a complex and time-consuming task, requiring expensive, disparate, and hard-to-use tools, with results that are difficult to integrate and intercompare. To address these issues and improve air quality decision-making by local, regional, and national planners, this proposal seeks to integrate key NASA satellite data to augment the databases, improve the models, and enhance the analytical capabilities of the VIEWS/TSS decision support system (DSS) currently used by the four Federal Land Managers (FLMs), the five EPA Regional Planning Organizations (RPOs), and state, tribal, and local agencies. These enhancements will be effected by using data from Aura, CALIPSO, Terra, and Aqua, and integrating statistical analysis tools to (a) improve methods for identifying pollutant sources and their respective contributions to visibility impairment in Federal Class I Areas, (b) provide fire activity data to calibrate a stochastic fire model and improve future-year fire emissions estimates, (c) facilitate interpretative analyses of ground-based, modeled, and emissions data, and (d) support control strategy development. End user requirements will be gathered from representatives at NPS, EPA, WRAP, and the state of North Carolina, and resulting enhancements will be evaluated by examining website statistics and end user feedback to determine the volume and type of NASA data interactions, the targets of user searches and navigation, and the nature of satellite-enhanced analyses incorporated into user emissions-control strategies. A final demonstration will compare baseline and enhanced DSS performance in assessing visibility in a selected region encompassing several Federal Class I Areas for base- and future-year periods of air quality simulation.