Conjunctive Use of Models to Design Cost-Effective Ozone Control Strategies

Abstract

The management of tropospheric ozone (O₃) is particularly difficult. The formulation of emission control strategies requires considerable information including: (1) emission inventories, (2) available control technologies, (3) meteorological data for critical design episodes, and (4) computer models that simulate atmospheric transport and chemistry. The simultaneous consideration of this information during control strategy design can be exceedingly difficult for a decision-maker. Traditional management approaches do not explicitly address cost minimization. This study presents a new approach for designing air quality management strategies; a simple air quality model is used conjunctively with a complex air quality model to obtain low-cost management strategies. A simple air quality model is used to identify potentially good solutions, and two heuristic methods are used to identify cost-effective control strategies using only a small number of simple air quality model simulations. Subsequently, the resulting strategies are verified and refined using a complex air quality model. The use of this approach may greatly reduce the number of complex air quality model runs that are required. An important component of this heuristic design framework is the use of the simple air quality model as a screening and exploratory tool. To achieve similar results with the simple and complex air quality models, it may be necessary to “tweak” or calibrate the simple model. A genetic algorithm-based optimization procedure is used to automate this tweaking process. These methods are demonstrated to be computationally practical using two realistic case studies, which are based on data from a metropolitan region in the United States.