Southeastern States Air Resource Managers (SESARM), Inc. has awarded a grant to the Georgia Institute of Technology, the University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill, and Colorado State University in the amount of $1,046,473. School of Civil and Environmental Engineering (CEE) faculty members Dr. M. Talat Odman, principal research engineer, and Dr. Armistead Russell, Georgia Power distinguished professor, will serve as co-PI’s on a Southeastern Modeling, Analysis, and Planning (SEMAP) project to aid in the development of state implementation plans (SIPs) required by the Clean Air Act.
In 2009, SESARM initiated the SEMAP project to produce technical analyses to aid participating agencies in the development of their respective implementation plans. SEMAP is supported by ten Southeastern states including Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia, and West Virginia, through the funding of two EPA grants. Specifically, Drs. Odman and Russell will perform emissions and air quality modeling tasks in collaboration with the Institute for the Environment at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill and the Cooperative Institute for Research in the Atmosphere at Colorado State University.
CEE researchers will provide future year (2013, 2016, and 2019) emissions projections using the SMOKE emissions processing system with MEGAN for biogenic emissions and MOVES for mobile sources. They will also provide air quality predictions for those years, focusing on predictions of ozone and particulate matter levels, using the CMAQ and CAMx models. The emissions projections and air quality predictions will be accessible to the other researcher on this project for various analyses through an internet-based Interactive Database Tool.
The SEMAP project is scheduled to run from April 13, 2010 to December 31, 2011. The project will have a critical impact on the Southeastern U.S. as participating state agencies have obligations to protect human health and the environment from the impacts of air pollutants. Each is responsible for air quality planning efforts and has primary authority and responsibility to develop, adopt, and implement SIPs for all air pollutants including fine particles, ozone, and regional haze. The SEMAP project addresses the next phase of ozone, fine particle, and regional haze assessment obligations of the participating states.
Dr. Armistead G. Russell has served as the Georgia Power Distinguished Professor of Environmental Engineering in CEE since 1996. His areas of expertise include air pollution modeling; aerosol dynamics; atmospheric chemistry; combustion emissions control; control strategy design; computer modeling; and numerical methods. He earned his Ph.D. in the Environmental Quality Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology.
Dr. M. Talat Odman is a principal research engineer in environmental engineering. Dr. Odman joined CEE at Georgia Tech in 1997. His research interests include air pollution meteorology and atmospheric chemistry; air quality modeling on local, urban, regional and global scales; computational fluid dynamics in environmental applications; numerical methods and algorithms, high performance computing; as well as visualization, decision support and expert systems. He earned his doctorate in mechanical engineering from Carnegie Mellon University and joined CEE at Georgia Tech in 1997. In addition, he serves as an associate professor of meteorology for the Turkish Council of Higher Education and as an adjunct assistant professor in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at North Carolina State University.