Charles Stanier, PhD
Running the Aerosol Screening Model for Iowa City, and adding nanoparticle-vegetation interaction to the Aerosol Screening Model
The aerosol screening model, described here was created at the University of Iowa and initially tested against measurements in Los Angeles. The model is a predictive model for ultrafine particles less than 0.1 μ m in diameter (UFPs) from vehicles. The uses of the model are (1) decision support for infrastructure projects, emissions controls, and transportation-mode shifts; (2) the interpretation and enhancement of observations (e.g., source apportionment, extrapolation, interpolation, and gap-filling in space and time); and (3) the generation of spatially and temporally resolved exposure estimates where monitoring is unfeasible.
The research objective is to apply the model in Iowa City Iowa, and to add some refinements to it, including losses of ultrafine aerosol particles from the air due to interactions with vegetation.
An introductory programming course is needed; the specific language is unimportant. Exposure to functions, subroutines, arrays, loops, and if-then logical program flow is needed.
The undergraduate student role is to (after initial training on the needed software) to run the ASM model. The model will be run for Iowa City and the concentration predictions visualized. As the student becomes familiar with the model (written in MATLAB) the aerosol-vegetation interaction will be researched in a literature search and then coded in MATLAB.
