Dust and aerosols are major components of air quality that have deleterious impacts on the environment, human health and national productivity. NASA’s Earth Science Applications Program has funded projects to model dust entrainment, transport and deposition; and to detect aerosols in order to transition modeled results to health agencies at local, state and national levels. This presentation covers research at UNM’s Earth Data Analysis Center on two projects: (1) Public Health Applications in Remote Sensing (PHAiRS) 2003-2011; and (2) Environmental Public Health Application Systems (ENPHASYS) 2008-2011. The first project was to create a nested model approach to atmospheric dust dynamics. It nested the dust regional atmospheric model (DREAM) into the National Weather Service model (NCEP/eta) to provide 48 hour dust forecasts to local healthcare providers. The second project incorporated components of US/EPA’s Community Multiscale Air Quality (CMAQ) model into the NCEP/eta processing stream to separate and evaluate the role of fugitive dust and aerosols contained within atmospheric dust transport loads in the Four Corners region of the American Southwest. Throughout both projects, emphasis was to calibrate and validate numerical model outputs against space-based and ground-based measurements.

In addition to model development and evaluation, both projects aimed to create and transfer new products to local, state and national health organizations for their evaluation and possible use in near real-time (i.e., health interventions) and statistically based (i.e., epidemiological) health surveillance systems.

The presentation illustrates several of the challenges encountered by project personnel and the diversity of approaches needed to verify and validate model outputs and user products. These steps resulted in an array of deterministic, statistical and mechanistic models to develop health-related information on air quality.