Events

Neighborhood-scale air quality and source inversion using large-eddy simulation

*Please note, this is an online event. Please register to receive the Zoom link*

People are starting to ask very detailed questions about the air we breathe in urban areas. Why is the air quality better or worse in certain parts of a city? How does a smoke plume disperse in a complex urban environment? What are the dominant sources of pollution in a given neighborhood? This talk will describe a multi-scale modeling framework which enables simulation of urban air flow at ultra-fine scales. Using the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model, we have designed a grid nesting framework which transitions from the mesoscale to the microscale, with down to 2 m resolution on the finest grid, with buildings resolved using an immersed boundary method. This grid nesting within WRF can now for the first time transfer meso-scale influences down to the micro- or urban scales. By combining this model setup with a Bayesian source inversion approach, we can perform local source apportionment to estimate strengths of stationary neighborhood air pollution sources. This means WRF can be used in the future to interpret local meteorological and air quality measurements, to understand spatial variations in urban areas, and to answer detailed questions about urban air flows and support environmental justice efforts to improve local air quality.

Tina is the Fred and Claire Sauer Chancellor’s Chair Professor in Environmental Engineering at the University of California, Berkeley. Tina completed her undergraduate studies at Harvard University, where she received a B.S. in Engineering Sciences in 1998. She then received M.S. (1999) and Ph.D. (2004) degrees in Environmental Fluid Mechanics and Hydrology from the department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Stanford University. She spent one year in the Atmospheric Sciences Division at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory as a post-doctoral researcher before joining UC Berkeley as a professor in 2005. Tina received an NSF CAREER award in 2007, the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) in 2011, and the Houghton Award from the American Meteorological Society in 2016. Her current research interests are in improving the numerical models used for weather prediction and air quality forecasts. She and her students have worked on predicting how wind turbines respond in turbulent flow, how wildfire smoke spreads, where pollution is distributed in an urban environment, and how winds are affected by complex mountainous terrain, among other applications. She teaches courses in fluid mechanics, numerical modeling, and community-engaged design.