Use of Geographic Information System Tools for Improving Atmospheric Emission Inventories of Biogenic Source

Biogenic source emissions refer to naturally occuring emissions from vegetation, microbial activities in soil, lightening, and so on. Vegetation is especially known to emit a considerable amout of volatile organic compounds into the atmosphere. Therefore, biogenic source emissions are an important input to photochemical air quality models. since most biogenic source emissions are calculated at the county-level, they should be geographically allocated to the computational grid cells of a photochemical air quality model prior to running the model. The traditional method for the spatial allocation for biogenic source emissions has been to use a "spatial surrogate indicator" such as a county area. In order to examine the applicability of such approximations, this study developed more detailed surrogate indicators to improve the spatial allocation method for biogenic source emissions. Due to the spatially variable nature of biogenic source emissions, Geographic Information Systems(GIS) were introduced as new tools to develop more detailed spatial surrogate indicators. Use of these newly developed spatial surrogate indicators for biogenic source emission allocation provides a better resolution than the standard spatial surrogate indicator.indicator.