I'm Tom Zinnen. I work here at the UW Madison Biotech Center and for UW Extension Cooperative Extension,
and on behalf of the Wisconsin
Alumni Association, the Science Alliance here at UW Madison, and Wisconsin Public Television,
thanks for coming to Wednesday
Nite at the Lab. We do this every Wednesday
Tonight I'm delighted to be able night, 50 times a year.
to introduce to you Professor Tracey Holloway. She's the director of the Center
for Sustainability and the
Global Environment, known by its acronym, SAGE.
research center based in the It's a cross-disciplinary
Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies here at UW-Madison.
Professor Holloway's research examines air pollution chemistry
between air quality and climate, and transport at regional and global scales, including links
energy, land use, health, and public policy. She earned her PhD in
atmospheric, oceanic, and space sciences, is that correct?
AOS? >> Atmospheric and oceanic
sciences. No space. >> No space.
And it's from Princeton University. It was in 2001 and she completed No final frontier.
technology and environmental a certificate in science
policy from the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and
And as we all know, where was President Wilson president International Affairs.
before he was president of the United States?
At Princeton. Her undergraduate degree is from
postdoctoral work was done Brown University in applied mathematics, and her
at Columbia University's Earth Institute.
Professor Holloway to Wednesday Nite at the Lab. Please join me in welcoming
[APPLAUSE] >> Tracey Holloway: Thank you
very much.
and we're particularly excited Thank you all very much for coming. It's really an honor to be here,
because the next four weeks will really showcase a breadth of
which we call SAGE. And as mentioned in the great introduction, thanks very much work at our research center,
Nelson Institute for Center for Sustainability and the Global Environment. for that, SAGE stands for the
the past three years. I'm actually taking the year off So I've been the director for
to focus on my research, which is what I'm really talking here
most about. So I'm happy to answer questions
material that I'm presenting after the talk either about the center broadly or about the
here. So the focus of my work is looking at air quality on large
regional scales up to global
In fact, as I just heard this morning, there was a White House And there's a lot of reasons to care about air quality.
report just issued yesterday which actually pointed out that
air quality regulations are the single largest regulatory expense in the United States. And in fact, about nearly 50% of
all costs across all US rules relate to air pollution control.
controlled is particulate matter, which we'll talk about And of those the number one pollution that is being
are actually enormous health quite a bit over the next hour. Despite these big costs, there
benefits to controlling air quality. And in fact, this same White
House report valued that the
benefits for controlling air pollution end up being valued somewhere between twice as much
and over 20 times as much as the
cost of controlling them in terms of reduced mortality and reduced sickness and loss of
days of work or days of school
across the United States. Beyond these numbers and big picture costs and benefits, air
pollution is something that really impacts all of our day-to-day life.
whether you choose to live near the highway or inland, whether It affects where we live,
you choose to live in Madison or Los Angeles, and maybe when you
choose to go outside for a walk or when you choose to exercise. It also impacts our cities and
Every city that we look at that has smokestacks, the only reason skylines.
that those smokestacks are there is because of air quality.
Although in the United States we
have strong rules in place that are acting to improve or air quality on an ongoing basis,
worldwide this is a huge global health challenge. So I'm going to focusing mostly here on the United States, but
keep in mind that if you go to
Beijing or to cities in India or even to rural villages in parts of Africa, the air quality there
is much worse than anything that
we're facing here in the US, and so thinking about how our solutions could translate into
an international context is an
into air pollution. And in fact, that's going to be the focus of some of the work clthis I'm presenting later.k
How do all of these different policies that we may be approaching separately, the Office of Energy Independence or
carbon reduction, how do those
earlier of how do we get our air all tie into this overarching concern that we've been regulating since 1970 and
to be clean and healthy. But one reason I personally like
in many ways it's an working on air quality is that
environmental success story. The air in the United States has
decade by decade since the Clean been getting cleaner and cleaner
Air Act was passed in the 1970s, and I think it can really serve as a great inspiration for
tackling some of these thornier issues like climate change or deforestation where the policies
along. are emerging and are not as far
So of all the chemicals that you may have learned about in chemistry class or all the
compounds in the air, there's really two that we're going to
be talking about over the rest of this talk.
And these are really public enemy number one and number two from the perspective of the EPA in terms of air quality impacts
on public health. So we're going to be seeing these over and over.
see these slides. But public enemy number one is I hope the lighting is okay to
of how coarse it is, with the coarser type of particulate matter, called PM10, which is particulate matter smaller than
10 microns, and the main concern
is particulate matter that's even smaller than that that has an diameter of less than
2.5 microns.
And this means that it's so small we can't even see it, much smaller than the diameter of a
human hair. And because it's so small it can
penetrate into the lungs and going deeper down and maybe even
penetrate into the blood stream.
So the way in the United States we consider these particles is by size.
So there's all different flavors
of all particles that are all regulated pretty much in the same way.
So what I'm showing up here is
flavors of particulate matter in the slide over our public enemy number one, particulate matter, is what are the different
major urban cities across the United States? And what you'll see is that the
yellow is a big chunk, over 25%,
of particulate matter in urban areas across the eastern United States.
And that yellow is sulfate. And sulfate is formed in the
atmosphere through reactions coming from sulfur dioxide.
And sulfur dioxide is primarily emitted from coal burning power plants. So when you see the yellow chunk
of particulate matter, you can
really think to yourself that is coal fired electricity
The green wedge is ammonium, and production.
that's primarily coming from agriculture.
coming, a large amount from transportation, also coming from The red is nitrate and that's
electricity production and other industrial sources.
And the gray, which is really a large fraction across the United
States, that can be a wide mix of everything from the black
smoke coming out of your diesel exhaust to smoke coming off of a
barbeque to particles that are created in the atmosphere
through chemical reactions. In California you see a lot of
matter problems, but there you big pies out there. They have a lot of particulate
see that the red plays a much bigger role and that's because the particles in California
arise primarily from
transportation, whereas coal burning electricity plays a much
the eastern United States. bigger role in the Midwest and
people's health in the same way, So even though the whole United States is subject to the same rules and the pollution affects
coming from a wide mix of at ldifferent sources.the current state of the science of public health, it's really
Our other big public enemy is ozone. So we'll come back to PM2.5 quite a bit.
And ozone is often referred to in the popular press as smog.
And it is created in the
atmosphere from two main ingredients: nitrogen oxide,
both transportation and power plants and our other these are ones that come from
manufacturing sources, and volatile organic compounds, and
this is a wide mix of chemicals and every time you walk through a pine forest and you smell that
And every time you go to fill up nice piney smell, that is a VOC.
your gas tank and there's that little rubber collar where the
actually a VOC reduction gas pump meets your car, that's
technology to prevent gasoline evaporation.
sources, NOx come from a wide mix of sources. Both are invisible and both react in the atmosphere to form
ozone, which is also invisible. So it's invisible but it is still very damaging to public health and agriculture.
So what I'm showing here, and it's hard to see, but this is yesterday's maximum particulate matter on the left and ozone on
the right.
pollution in eyes of the EPA. And what moderate means is that we would not want to is it every that's considered moderate air
would be illegal to have it every day of the year, but from time to time it's okay to go day of the year, in fact it
And as soon as it gets into the orange, that is actually into the yellow.
considered too high, even for a single day.
So just yesterday for public
enemy number one, almost all of the west coast, all of California, is in the yellow and
about half or a third of the
yesterday around Chicago area mand then in the southeast. United States are in the yellow and there's a few oranges
sensitive groups and not that healthy for most people. So just yesterday we have a ton of areas that are unhealthy for
again this is yesterday's values, we see lots of areas in California, Texas and Oklahoma, the Midwest, and the east coast
that are in the orange area, the
And I don't have to look for a unhealthy for sensitive groups. So I pull these slides up every time I give a public lecture.
special day when it was particularly bad, any day I'll have orange and yellow dots on
these EPA maps. And if you're ever interested in
website is called AIRnow.gov. >> What do you mean by sensitive checking out what the air pollution levels are, a great
EPA defines sensitive groups as, groups? >> Well, that's how the EPA, the
broadly, children, people with respiratory disease, and the
But the truth is it's not healthy for anybody. elderly.
That's just sort of a way of communicating how bad is bad.
But the way that, the science community, we talk about things in terms of concentrations and
this AIRNow website is micrograms per meter cubed, but
specifically designed by the EPA to communicate air pollution to the public, and so they try to
convert it into green, yellow,
that. oAnd so basically, when it'se Hoorange, it is not good.or When it's yellow, it's still not
good but from time to time
that's expected. So this is just what it was doing yesterday.
We'll get a little more general.
The reason we care about unhealthy for sensitive groups
really bad air quality is because of the health impacts. or moderate air quality or
Primarily asthma and other respiratory diseases but there's
also very strong evidence linking it to heart disease,
everyone, and other risks. diabetes, infant mortality, actually increased mortality for
meter cubed was found, across 50 cities in the United States, to extend life expectancy 5 jby about seven months.er
And just to put what does 10
micrograms per meter cubed mean, just that yellow zone,
per meter cubed. that spans 20 micrograms
So moving from orange down to green would give you about twice as much of a benefit as this
seven-month metric. So these are big numbers that really do have direct impacts for all of us.
And with air pollution and
cancer, you can't draw health risk, just like with eating cheese burgers and heart disease, or smoking and lung
a one-to-one relationship. But this is something that
factor. And I'll say from my own strongly increases the risk
experience, I grew up with asthma, and when I'm in an
environment that has elevated air pollution, I definitely find
myself reaching for my inhaler more often than I would
otherwise.
So who's affected? Many, many people.
cities that are affected by one of these two major air Over a third of the US live in
counties where the ozone is above the standard defined by the EPA as healthy, actually And although more people live in
and dangerous pollutant. PM2.5 is the more damaging
And these thresholds are But all together, about a third of the US is in counties that are above these thresholds.
that's coming out of the public actuhealth community.nder rAnd so actually just thisr summer, later this month, we're
expecting to have a revision on the ozone standard. So that should be something that
in the next few weeks. you might see in the newspapers
So we see that there's these sort of this pass/fail defined
Protection Agency. by United States Environmental
And if we look at our two major pollutants, this is a ballpark map for each of them about who
is failing. And we see because these
standards are being revised, these may not be the most
up-to-date maps, but it gives you an idea of what are the areas that tend to have the worst air pollution.
And on the left these are the counties that are out of
right those are the counties attainment with the particulate matter standards, and on the
that are out of attainment with the ozone standards. And so we see there's more areas
out of attainment with the ozone
standard, which is one reason why more people were affected by ozone on our previous plot.
California, of course famous for
its smog and bad air quality, is out of attainment with both of them almost everywhere, but
large regions of the east coast and the Midwest are both
this just says passing or failing. affected by these pollutants. Now these maps from the EPA,
said they were getting a D, you wouldn't be that happy. And so just because you're brought home a report card that
really doing a great job. And so to dig a little bit passing doesn't mean that you're
Association actually took this deeper into some of these numbers, the American Lung
metaphor literally and started issuing grades to counties and
to say just because you're not cities across the United States
failing, just because you're not colored in on these maps up here, doesn't mean that
everything is hunky dory. So they use the same data from
uses, the American Lung Association was a little bit the EPA, pretty much the same calculation methods that the EPA
but the data is exactly the same stricter in how they graded for particulate matter pollution,
as the EPA uses. So on my next slide I'm going to
cities according to the American tell you who are the worst
Lung Association based on measured data, for particulate matter and for ozone.
And I might think to yourself who you would suspect to be in
talk about ozone. That's pretty much what we would each of those categories. Well, for short-term, first I'll
New York, Atlanta, Pittsburgh, expect. Los Angeles, more in California,
but you'll probably be surprised here we are in Wisconsin to see that among the 25 dirtiest
cities for short-term particulate matter, three are right here in Wisconsin.
Chicago zone that extends into Number 17 on their list is the
Michigan City, Indiana, and into southern Wisconsin. And we could say that's not
really Wisconsin, that's
Chicago. But we can't quite say the same thing when we get to number 23,
which is Green Bay, Wisconsin,
might find surprising is tied and with Phoenix, Arizona.ght here in Madison extending up to the Baraboo area, which you
time to time. >> Phoenix just exceeded us, by If any of ythe way.been there it's quite smoggy there from
We were tied with them according >> Okay, they just passed us?
to what I checked. >> We don't have all that dust
Oh, right with the big dust cloud. cloud.
came through Phoenix yesterday, thanks for bringing that up, Absolutely, absolutely. The big dust cloud that just
actually that is exactly the kind of particulate matter that
we're talking about, but there
it's coming from a natural source. And so you might think to
yourself, is a place like Phoenix going to be penalized by
this big dust storm? Does this mean that they start
failing these standards?
And that's a very complicated question as to what really counts for passing and failing.
In the same way that a student
might say to the teacher but this time there was an exception
standard. But actually because forest fires, dust storms, that kind of of why I wasn't able to meet the
beyond the control of the cities thing, do happen and really are
and the counties that they do get a pass for that. So that dust storm that happened
will not be affecting the grade that Phoenix gets, either from
So now that we see that these two pollutants actually are a thproblem even right here inn or from the EPA.
see Green Bay on the list, but Wisconsin, I was surprised to
which pretty much is a nice overview of the city, and you see that big plant right in the background with big billowing
smoke coming out of the smokestack. So it's not hard to see why Green Bay might wind up in that
category, although it certainly surprised me when I saw it. >> Do you know if that's smoke
That, to me, looks like smoke because it's kind of gray. or is that water vapor?
It could be water vapor but even with water vapor there are a lot
of invisible gas chemicals. So anytime you see something
But beyond what you actually see like smoke in the air, that's particulate matter.
in the air, there's a lot of chemicals that can combine to make particulate matter or ozone
or other pollutants.
So why isn't the US And thesscoring an "A"?ing from We have the technology, we have the knowledge, but why are these
two public enemies so elusive?
Why can't we catch them? And one problem is that many
contribute to both ozone and different emission sources
particulate matter. It's not just a one-to-one if we control this power plant or that
car we'll solve the problem.
It's a very multifaceted challenge that cuts across
economy. almost every sector of our
Once these chemicals are emitted from tailpipes and smokestacks
then react in the atmosphere in complicated ways and that may depend on whether it's warm or and agricultural fields, they
So the weather conditions really cold or humid or cloudy.
of smoke or air mass of ozone is affect the chemical reactions and the weather conditions also affect where a particular plume
transported, whether pollution from Chicago moves up across the
whether emissions from China are lake to hit Door County or
emission sources, what the land cover is also affects pollution. to hit the United States. Beyond weather and all the
We often get the highest ozone right over Lake Michigan.
Now there's no emission sources,
chemicals are in the air above or there's some ships, but no major, major emission sources over Lake Michigan, but once
the lake they stay there because the lake surface isn't really sticky to chemicals.
In contrast, leaves and grass and ground cover actually take
up quite a lot of chemicals in the air just because it's, we
refer to it in the air pollution
field as dry deposition. But you can really just think of
surfaces to the chemicals. it as how sticky are these
So when you're over water, water is not sticky and the chemicals stay in the air longer and can
build up. And so all of these things
together means that when you have ozone in the atmosphere or
particulates in the atmosphere, they can mix over a very wide geographic area.
what's in your own backyard. So it's not enough to control
truly keep air quality at levels States have to be working together and even countries may have to be working together to
deemed safe. So the work that's going on in
on... Excuse me. my group at SAGE really focuses
On answering what-if questions that can inform the development
of strategies for cleaner air.
Questions like, what if we conserved more electricity, or
we expanded or solar energy production or moved more freight had cleaner trucks, or what if
or windier? And what happens as other countries are growing and their Wair emissions are moving overr
to the United States? What would that do to the health of the air over the United States?
Would that improve our grade? Not that we are focused so much on that but just building on
So to answer these questions, there's a few challenges. We have to take account of all this metaphor.
look at just emissions from trucks without thinking about how they interact with weather the emissions because you can't
agriculture and emissions from conditions and emissions from
They change hour to hour. Think about rush hour traffic versus the middle of the night. Month to month, summer versus
winter has very different patterns in terms of energy use and land cover. And, of course, year to year,
in part because of emission controls. And in part because of changing population, changing patterns
of energy consumption and land use. So then we think about how these
atmosphere in three dimensions pollutants move through the
and how they respond to changing weather conditions. So the approach that we use to
answer this is to use computer
So this Wednesday Nite at the Lab, if you were to come to our lab it wouldn't have any fancy front of computers all day.
lab coats but this is one room gizmos or we wouldn't be wearing
that we use at our building at the university to be looking at data and doing computer
programming.
what kind of math is being And these models are based on mathematical equations. And when you're thinking about
invoked, hark back to your calculus class because your calculus is the science to
describe change.
And what we're talking about here are chemical changes,
motion, changes in the amount of changes with fluid dynamic
radiation coming through the atmosphere. So all of these changing
processes can be described with derivatives.
And once you start solving those derivatives with differential
equations, that's as far down the math route as I'll go, then you can actually start kind of
in terms of chemical backing out what we would expect
contributes to air pollution concentrations and temperatures and transport of how much one chemical plant or one city
computers and then use software to make pretty plots like this We solve these mathematical equations with powerful
is an elevation, one of the inputs that goes into our model, plot on the lower left. Actually what that is,
generating from this process. The flow chart in the upper left but it gives you an idea of the kind of maps that we're
modeling system. corner just shows the different components that go into this
We need to take account of weather.
weather on three dimensions, So we have to have gridded
to calculate it every 15 minutes calculated, really, minute by minute. We use it every 15 minutes but
you almost have to do it minute by minute. So we have three-dimensional
weather conditions calculated minute by minute and then those combine with emissions from all of these different sectors that
I just noted earlier. Both man-made and natural emissions.
think about what is flowing into The boundary conditions, you
our area from outside, our local sources, and then we calculate
reactions and other mathematical it up in terms of chemical
processes. So that's the ballpark of what
The models that we use are we do.
really the state of the science for doing this kind of analysis. Our chemical models are from the
United States Environmental Protection Agency and our meteorology models are from the National Center for Atmospheric
Research in Boulder, Colorado.
So we have a nice team here, in fact one of our gang is in the back.
And the graduate students,
undergraduates, and occasional postdocs who I work are really
trenches drudging through sometimes challenging software the ones who are out in the
that connect these sort of real world what-if questions with air problems, but at the end of the day we're all addressing issues
quality and public health. So I could tell you seven
different stories about the work
that we're doing, but I just want to focus on one since we only have an hour and now moving
into about 20 minutes.
A few years ago, our past Wisconsin governor, Jim Doyle, initiated the Global Warming
Task Force. And you may remember this.
It was an effort to say what would be the most cost effective
ways for the state of Wisconsin to reduce our carbon emissions. So a great project. And they hired consultants and
scientists and they really
worked together to think renewable energy and energy conservation and what would be
the best strategies for our state to reduce carbon
emissions. But of all the things they
thought about, air quality was
really never explicitly part of that discussion. And not because air quality
isn't relevant for Wisconsin, we've already seen that it
definitely is, but that actually it's very difficult to start
bringing all of these other pollutants that mix in the
discussion as energy efficiency and carbon reductions. atmosphere with weather conditions into the same
nobody analyzes the direct air And so across the United States and around the world, almost
are over here, the energy and climate people are on the other side of the room, and there's not many people running back and
forth to relay messages.
So all of these policies were developed by the Task Force on Global Warming and we thought it
would be interesting so say,
okay, let's imagine that these are implemented, would that help
What would be the benefits of these proposed policies? us get cleaner air in Wisconsin?
And so we got funding from the Wisconsin Focus on Energy
program and we focused on electric power production in the
state of Wisconsin answering this question: how would these
low carbon policies benefit air quality?
co-benefits from energy efficiency and renewables is a So the approach that we have to use to calculate these
bit convoluted, but believe it or not this is a simplification
of what we're really doing. First, you start up in the upper
left corner where you actually have some set of policies, and
we were fortunate to just build on all the hard work that the task force had already done so
starting point. Once you say okay those are the policies, what would that we actually mean in terms ofas a
reduced fossil fuel combustion? And of course, that doesn't mean
that every plant is reducing by, say, 20%.
Some power plants are going to
Others might actually be scaled up to compensate for renewable Some are going to be scaled back.
intermittency. Then you calculate what the
changes in different pollutants being emitted from the power
plants would be and we take this as input to our model.
We take every other emission
because, again, we can't look at just electricity in isolation.
on weather conditions and we We bring in all the information
churn it all through our equations in our computers to calculate the change in air
pollution and the resulting change in air quality.
And in our case we worked very So this kind of approach is really a team effort.
closely with Dr. Paul Meier, who is the director of the
Institute. University Wisconsin Energy
And he had developed an electricity model called myPower that relies totally on
transparent publicly available
electricity models in operation, data from the Department of Energy. There are, of course, a lot of
expensive, we're talking about but they're all proprietary and extremely expensive to license. And when I say extremely
like $100,000 for a one-year license.
that here in our research group. And so we really can't afford
So Paul, as part of his PhD, actually built an electricity model from the ground up, and we
used that to say if these policies were implemented, which
really be the net change in these key pollutant emissions. power plants would be on, which would be off, and what would
Then we took weather calculations from a former
student and now scientist working with me, Caitlin
Littlefield, who used this atmospheric weather model, we
call it WRF, the weather
researching and forecasting model. And then one of my former
students and another current
part-time scientist working with me is Steve Plachinski, and Steve took the emissions
information and the weather information and calculated what the air quality would be. And so most of the work that I'm
showing here is from Steve's
master's thesis and a paper that we'll be submitting actually
Environmental Science and Technology. So the first thing that we want to do is to say how good are
these models. And consistently we check our models with ground-based
EPA, and more and more against measurements, mostly from the US
satellite data from NASA. For the energy model, the best data to compare with were
reported emissions from what's
called the Clean Air Markets Program.
the estimates of electricity And so on the bottom axis are
generation, NOx emissions, and SO2 emissions from the this clean air market, so this is the
real world. And on the Y axis is what was calculated by Paul Meier's
And if things are perfect, they lie right along that one-to-one line. And amazingly these red dots
pretty much do lie along that one-to-one line.
the first time that Paul's model I mean, we were so happy to see this because this was actually
was used across the state of Wisconsin and that we had this
In fact, the total NOx and data to compare.
sulfur dioxide emissions agree within 1% between the two if you
Of course some individual power plants are not within 1%. But that's great. We were really excited.
So then the next thing we did is
we focused on emissions of NOx and emissions of SO2. And just to sort of tie us back
to our pie chart that we saw
earlier in the talk, the SO2 relates to those yellow pies and
And actually the green pieces of the NOx relates to the red pies.
pie, that's from agriculture and that's almost always tagged on
or the sulfate. So by just looking at particulates resulting from NOx tand SO2 emissions, we're stille
covering over 50% of the
particles across this region. So then we wanted to see how good is the atmospheric model.
And this is the kind of plots that I'm more used to looking at. And this is pretty good.
This is about the state of the
science that some places the model does well, some places not
But if we have observations on so well.
the X axis here and the model on the Y axis and we see that for
pie, that the red dots are sulfate, and that's the yellow
pretty much hugging that one-to-one line.
it's definitely when the They're not perfect for sure but
observations are high, the model is high; when the observations
We'll skip over the middle chart are low, the model is low.
is high; when the observations for a moment and go to ozone. And again ozone, when the observations are high, the model
are low, the model is low. The model is a little bit too high overall, that's why the
bulge is kind of above that line. But that's actually typical of
and regional air quality models for ozone. almost every one of both global
for some reason there's always a The models do a really good job at linking cause and effect but
we don't do a good job. lI'm not going to lie to you. most of these models. Now for nitrate in the middle
is an area in the models that's really evolving. But actually almost nobody does a good job for nitrate so this
particular region and this So overall we do pretty good on our comparison across this
particular year, which was 2003. We were as happy as we expected to be.
We could always do better but this is kind of what we thought we'd see. So using this set of models now
that we know that they're all pretty reliable, the first thing
policy that was proposed by the Task Force on Global Warming. And what that policy was to have by 2024 a 12% increase in
demand rather than the business as usual assumption of a 35%
15 years, demand is going up. But is it going to go up by 35% or can we use energy efficiency measures to keep that at a more
modest 12%? And already on the books is a plan for a 12% renewable
force recommended doubling this to a 24% renewable portfolio portfolio standard, and the task
This was sort of the input to our analysis. This is what we had to start So these were the policies.
And using Paul Meier's myPower from.
model, then we said comparing current conditions, 2008, this 2004 business as usual, if we
don't change anything, and then a 2024 policy case. What happens to total electricity generation, what
happens to the percent of renewable energy, and then what happens to emissions, not just
and SO2? of carbon dioxide, but of NOx
And I won't go into the details on this chart except to say that the generation goes up in the
future but goes up by much less with the renewable and
efficiency standards in place. And that even if we don't do
anything we have scheduled
reductions in NOx and SO2 on the books, but we get more reduction
with this efficiency and demand reduction. in these pollutants if we go
distinguishing between fossil CO2 and biological CO2? >> Well, this is using currently >> With the CO2, are you
And so there are no-- biomass is a very small part built plants.
of this calculation, if it's included at all.
Yeah, good question.
So after running these scenarios through the electricity model and then through the air quality
model, we come up with something
that looks like this for Milwaukee.
month, July, and one year, 2004, And again we look just at one
so I caution against generalizing these results too
of a proof of concept to say how much, but this was really more
can we link all of these tools together to answer these kind of
We're actually moving forward to questions.
answer them on a longer term over a wider area.
Milwaukee, and this is looking But what you get here in
at sulfate, that yellow piece of the pie, is that, and I'd like
the red line and the blue line. The blue line is current you to focus your attention on
conditions, 2008, base case. The red line is with the planned
improvements as well as the efficiency in the renewable portfolio standards.
and the blue line, through much of this month they're really So if you look at the red line
indistinguishable. So it's not like this reduction
just has a small effect throughout the year.
except in certain periods. No. They're almost indistinguishable
planned improvements and the Like here around the July 6th through 7th we see the most notable difference where the
Milwaukee by quite a lot. And there are other periods, we marked them with gray on this cochart, where we do see theer
larger differences between this what-if scenario and business as
usual. So then we said, okay, this is
great, this is sulfate, this is one piece of the pie, but what
about, that's what the American Lung Association is grading us about the total PM? That's what we're concerned
And so what we find, again in this one month in Milwaukee, is that on the days that we saw the public health.
scenarios, that the air pollution tended to be not the biggest change in our two
dirtiest of the dirty, but certainly not the cleanest of
the clean either. That it tended to be these sort of middle days. This would be yellow on our air
quality index framework where we
saw the biggest change in pollution. So we thought to ourselves this
is interesting for Milwaukee, what about across the whole region and across the whole state?
Do these measures make the
dirtiest days cleaner? That's what we'd hope.
cleanest days a little bit Or do they just make the
cleaner? So what we did is to first look at right now across the region
how many hours is the PM2.5 above 15? 15 is the threshold where you move from green into yellow
on our air quality index. And so how many hours in the
And so out of 744 hours in the month have pollution above that level?
month of July, we had, across the region, many places that had over 250 hours above that
threshold and then some regions that were even above 350, so had
In Wisconsin, we're doing a little bit better. almost half of the hours in the month above that cutoff value.
Most of our area has somewhere between either zero or in the
southeast and northeast parts of
the state between, say, 10 and 200 hours that are above that health-based threshold.
So this is the number of hours
that we have bad air. Are we doing any better with these scenarios?
And the answer is yes.
We actually saw, just with these pretty modest changes, that we're having somewhere around 5
to 10 fewer hours in the month
of July of bad air. And what this actually means when we start doing some
percentage calculations is that across much of the region, and
this is the plot on the right, in Wisconsin we actually have
about half the state seeing 5%
to 20% fewer hours of unhealthy air. And that's a pretty big
punchline considering that these
policies were designed without even thinking about these sort
health. So there's some lessons learned from this kind of analysis. First of all, that even simple
clean energy policies that
didn't even consider air pollution can still yield big benefits.
But, of course, if these are the
benefits that we kind of got accidentally from the way that
would be implemented across the state, the benefits to air the renewable portfolio standard
quality could be much greater if energy policies and climate
policies were designed to coordinate management of air
And so hopefully those air pollution, energy strategies, and climate change.
of the room actually start pollution people on one side of the room and the energy and climate people on the other side
talking to each other more because when we're spending so
it just doesn't make sense to not be integrating that with our much to regulate air pollution
energy planning decisions. And even in our Wisconsin's case
state, the changes that are concentrated in northeast Wisconsin end up affecting the
saw was ranked as number 23 by Green Bay area, which we already
And in Green Bay about 9% of the the American Lung Association for exactly this type of thing, short-term particle pollution.
population has asthma and about 27% has heart disease. So this is not a negligible
issue to benefit those citizens just of that one city.
So a 10% reduction in short-term bad air could make a difference.
So as we move into--
These models are very powerful, but as we've seen, they're not perfect.
And so of course there's an interest of bringing to bear
as many new tools and data as possible.
And a really exciting area that I'm getting involved in now is
to be linking satellite data with air quality management.
And in fact, NASA has just put
together what they're calling the Air Quality Applied Sciences Team.
It's a five-year project and it just is starting this month.
And so I'm one of 16 researchers across the US who's a member of
that team, and it's going to be very exciting to move forward and try to link these space and the final frontier data sets
with real world decision-making and air quality management
needs. What I'm showing you here is one
example of the kind of work that
we're doing where on the upper left panel are viewing these
can't see them with our eyes, but the satellites can see them from outer space. So this is seeing NO2, one of
those pollutants we've mentioned
a few times today. And of course we see that NO2 is
like the eastern United States highest in population centers
and parts of the Midwest, but we also see that in pretty rural areas, like even in the western
United States, where there are
rail lines and where there are a lot of trucks on the road, you
satellites from outer space. can see that pollution from the
And, again, this NO2, this is invisible. So seeing these patterns is
really cool.
So I'm just going to give you a foreshadowing of what you'll see in the next three weeks.
The kind of work that I've been talking about here, using computer models, satellite data,
very typical of the kind of work ground-based measurements, is
that my colleagues and I are doing at our center SAGE. And whereas my work focuses on
air quality, others focus on
public health, urban environment, agriculture, water,
between these. climate, energy, and the links
So I think that the next three talks should be really a treat. You have some great speakers
coming up.
And you're very welcome to check out our website which is
We're part of the Nelson SAGE.wisc.edu.
Institute for Environmental Studies and I'm a professor in the Nelson Institute and so
these broader scientific
approaches really fit into broader themes of conservation
That's one reason why it's and education and awareness.
really a delight to be here with you this evening. So thanks very much and I'm
happy to take any questions.
[APPLAUSE]