The energy system is currently responsible for the majority of U.S. emissions of criteria air pollutants, greenhouse gases, and short-lived climate forcing pollutants. Understanding how the energy system may evolve in the future and the resulting implications on the environment is critical if environmental decision-makers are to address these challenges proactively and efficiently.

The goal of this session is to highlight research efforts involved in exploring the linkages among air quality, climate and energy, with focus on supporting decision-making at federal, state or local levels. Among the topics that are appropriate for inclusion are:

• Scenario approaches for examining energy system futures, including exploring linkages between population growth, economic growth, land use change, climate change, technology change, policy and energy
• Impact of the future energy system on sustainability and vulnerability metrics
• Translating energy system modeling into climate and air quality impacts
• Identifying interactions between strategies for climate mitigation and air quality management, including quantification of co-benefits and holistic management strategies that simultaneously meet both goals
• Models, tools and methodologies for assessing air, climate and energy linkages

This session is dedicated to the application of innovative methodologies for preparing and processing emissions for air quality modeling applications. Techniques to improve estimates of wild fires, dust and biogenic emissions, and temporal allocation of anthropogenic sources are of special interest for this session. Session topics include:

• Updates to inventories and emissions processing
• Emissions from alternative fuel use (e.g., bio-fuels in the transportation sector)
• Emissions from aviation activities
• Projection of emissions to future-year scenarios
• Inverse modeling
• Natural emission sources

Both observations and modeling studies have demonstrated the long-range inter-continental transport of pollutants. Changes in emission patterns over different regions of the world are likely to exacerbate the impacts of long-range pollutant transport on background pollutant levels in another region, which may then impact the attainment of local air quality standards. Additionally, increased concerns of climate impacts on regional and local ecosystem disciplines have driven the need to utilize outputs from global models into regional modeling systems with different temporal and spatial scales. In such applications, downscaling approaches have been used to link the two modeling systems, with different physical and dynamical characteristics, to bridge the gap between global and local effects. This session seeks papers that discuss key issues related to the consistent coupling of atmospheric physical and chemical processes on local-to-global scales and related modeling applications. Topics of interest in this session include:

• Hemispheric chemistry transport models
Global/Regional climate modeling applicationsDynamical and statistical downscalingCase studies and modeling scenarios related to impacts on the ecosystemModel evaluation and inter-comparisonBoundary influence of global modeling

Nitrogen oxides (NOx) and their reaction products (i.e. NOy) are an important precursor to ozone and particulate matter pollution and can impact nutrient loads to aquatic ecosystems. NOx emissions come from a variety of anthropogenic and natural sources including onroad vehicles, nonroad equipment, power plants, other combustion sources, wildland fires, soils, and lightning. Some recent studies in the scientific literature have found discrepancies between concentrations predicted by photochemical models and ambient measurement. These discrepancies could be attributed to emissions, meteorological model transport, model chemistry, or deposition processes or related to uncertainties in the measurements themselves. This session seeks submissions of new research results which use ambient measurements (e.g. routine ambient monitoring network data, near-road and tunnel measurement, special field campaign data, satellite data and deposition measurements) to characterize, evaluate, or constrain processes impacting the total modeled NOy budget. In addition, this session welcomes submissions which use new data or methods to more accurately characterize NOx emissions or photochemical model processes. Submissions along the following topics all fit within the scope of this session:

• Updates to emissions and implications for budgets
• Ambient constraint methodologies and applications
• Sampling methods and uncertainties
• Meteorological and seasonal factors
• Reaction and deposition lifetimes in the atmospheric Boundary Layer
• Removal processes, dry and wet deposition

Preference will be given to abstracts that make a clear connection between emissions or model processes and observations.

Work in recent years has vastly improved the science of air quality and methodologies for modeling and analyzing the distribution of air pollutants at various temporal and spatial scales. Such advances were motivated by the results from the multitude of applications and evaluations of air quality models that addressed various research, development and regulatory modeling issues. We seek abstracts that illustrate innovative methodologies and process algorithms in air quality modeling. Session topics include:

• Adjoint models
• Variable and adaptive grids
• New mechanisms of chemical reactions and processes for air quality modeling
• Production and decay of hazardous air pollutants (HCHO, acetaldehyde, acrolein, nitroPAHs)
• Reaction kinetics and mechanisms for heterogeneous chemistry that affect gas and aerosol compounds, including in-cloud chemistry
• Modeling assimilation techniques
• Land Surface Models
• Dust models

Evaluation of air quality modeling systems (including meteorological and emissions models) is a key to verify the integrity of such modeling systems for various applications at various spatial and temporal resolutions. Abstracts are invited that present results of model evaluation studies, with emphasis on new techniques for model evaluation. Session topics include:

• Diagnostic tools
• Analyses and comparisons with data from measurement networks
• Model inter-comparisons
• Process evaluation, including dynamic evaluation
• Sensitivity of air quality models to meteorological inputs

The purpose of this session is to present modeling approaches for various applications ranging from exposure assessments in support of health studies to near-source assessments such as near-roadway studies or community-scale applications.ﾠ A variety of models can provide these detailed, spatially-, and temporally-resolved concentrations in support of environmental health studies. Models also provide an opportunity to examine how changes in emissions affect near-road air quality or other near-to-source impacts.ﾠ Local governments and community groups may be interested in "what if" scenarios such as how to optimize traffic patterns around heavily polluted areas.ﾠFor example, when schools are located near roadways, models can help to examine potential impacts on children's health or the relative contribution of school-related exposure compared to, or combined with, home-related exposure.

The topics for this session will involve development, evaluation and application of models with the following focal areas:

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• Air quality modeling for exposure assessments in support of environmental health studies
• Dispersion model development for applications with near-source complexities
• Evaluation and inter-comparison of models for near roadway applications
• Decision support tools to quantify risk of human exposure

Air quality models continue to be important tools for guiding decision makers in preparing State Implementation Plan (SIP) applications to set standards for compliance. We seek abstracts that describe how air quality models are used in specific applications, with particular emphasis on the types of sensitivity and diagnostic analyses employed and on the model evaluation studies that were conducted for various applications.

This session topics include (but are not limited to):

• Model intercomparison
• Statistical analyses and evaluation metrics
• Source Apportionment modeling
• Impacts on air quality that result from controlling air pollutants
• Socioeconomic and health impacts

Papers in this session are devoted to analyzing data from both conventional and remote-sensing observational platforms. In particular, presentations are invited on the integration of data collected from different platforms, and on the use of new satellite data products in air quality modeling. Session topics include:

• Satellite data
• Conventional measurement networks
• Field measurement studies
• Laboratory smog chamber experiments
• Aerosol detection and sampling
• Atmospheric transport and dispersion field data sets

Improving spatial resolution of air quality models applicable to urban areas is critical for accurate air quality and population exposure estimates used in advanced epidemiologic studies. Meteorological models are often executed at a very fine grid spacing (less than 1km) to provide meteorological conditions of transport, and dispersion for modeling air quality for urban areas. This session will examine topics related to the development of urban database (such as WUDAPT) and fine scale modeling advancements that help improve characterization of meteorological and air quality modeling for urban areas. Particular emphases will be on recent advancements in urban databases for fine scale urban area modeling applications and studies. Topics under this session include:

• Urban database development for meteorological and air quality applications
• Integrated Mesoscale/Urban Scale modeling approaches for exposure assessment (e.g. WRF/urban, CMAQ/R-Line)
• Hybrid modeling approaches that involve combining fields for (a) primary and secondary pollutants, ozone and PM2.5 (b) grid-scale and sub-grid-scale outputs or (c) observations and model outputs
• Integrating Local Climate Zones (LCZs) into urban scale modeling applications
• Ground level measurements from monitoring networks
• Demonstrated applications during extreme weather conditions (e.g. Heat waves)