Hi Everyone,
SOCAAR is pleased to announce an additional Seminar for November:
Wednesday, November 30, 2016
2:30 – 3:30 PM
200 College Street, WB 407
Sources of Fossil Fuel and Biomass Burning Black Carbon in Ontario
Dr. Robert Healy
Senior Environmental Officer
Environmental Monitoring and Reporting Branch
Ontario Ministry of the Environment and Climate Change
The Ontario Ministry of the Environment and Climate Change and the Southern Ontario Centre for Atmospheric Aerosol Research operate several
air quality stations across the province. Sources of black carbon (BC) aerosol influencing air quality in Ontario were investigated using nine concurrent aethalometer datasets collected between June 2015 and May 2016. The stations are located in Toronto, Hamilton,
and Windsor and represent a mix of background and near-road locations. An optical model, based on assumed absorption properties for fossil fuel combustion and biomass burning aerosol, was used to estimate the relative contributions of these two sources to
ambient concentrations of BC at every site. The highest annual mean BC concentration (1.7 µg m-3) was observed at a near-road site adjacent to Toronto’s Highway 401. Fossil fuel combustion was the dominant contributor to ambient BC at all sites in every season,
while the highest seasonal biomass burning relative mass contribution (33%) was observed in winter at a background site on the Toronto Islands. A strong seasonal dependence was observed for fossil fuel BC concentrations at every Ontario site, with mean summer
concentrations higher than their respective mean winter concentrations by up to a factor of two. Quantitative transport bias analysis was used to investigate this seasonal effect, and the influence of transboundary fossil fuel emissions will be discussed.
can we assess the regional impacts of global environmental policy? We explore this question for mercury, a local-to-global toxic pollutant recently targeted by a global environmental treaty (UN Minamata Convention). Evaluating whether global policy can effectively
reduce mercury inputs into vulnerable ecosystems is difficult due to uncertainty in the path from international treaty to human exposure and impacts. Combining approaches from air quality modelling and social science, we explore the range of environmental
and human health impacts that may be consistent with the Minamata Convention for the Great Lakes region, given uncertainty in social, technological, and natural systems. We discuss how these results can inform policy design, monitoring of policy compliance
and effectiveness, and more generally, adaptive governance of cross-scale atmospheric pollutants.
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