A new way to model urban air pollution

Urban regions account for an ever increasing fraction of Earth’s population, and are consequently an ever increasing source of air pollutants. These pollutants include anthropogenic aerosols, which have important climate and health implications. But modeling aerosol emissions from urban areas is difficult due to the detailed temporal and spatial scales required. Thus, urban areas significantly contribute to the overall uncertainty and variability in global atmospheric model predictions of aerosol and pollutant distribution. 

To address these uncertainties, researchers from the MIT Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change set out to see if they could better model aerosol emissions and distribution from urban regions. 

Read more