2016 Conference Call for Papers

The 15th Annual CMAS Conference will be held on October 24-26, 2016 at the Friday Center, UNC-Chapel Hill.

Sessions | Extended Abstract Guidelines | Presenter Information

CMAS is NO LONGER accepting oral and poster abstracts for the sessions listed below . The deadline to submit oral and poster abstracts for the 15th Annual CMAS Conference has passed. Please see the 15th Annual CMAS Conference Agenda to view accepted oral and poster abstracts.

Submissions will be sent to the respective session chairs for review. Presenters will be notified of their acceptance status on or after 08/15/2016. We will make every effort to include all reasonable submissions. If the presentation is accepted, the presenter will be asked to submit an extended abstract for publication on our web site.

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Sessions planned for the 15th Annual CMAS Conference:

Session 1: Model Development

Work in recent years has vastly improved the science of air quality and methodologies for modeling and analyzing the distribution of air pollutants at various temporal and spatial scales. Such advances were motivated by the results from the multitude of applications and evaluations of air quality models that addressed various research, development and regulatory modeling issues. We seek abstracts that illustrate innovative methodologies and process algorithms in air quality modeling. Session topics include:

• Adjoint models
• Variable and adaptive grids
• New mechanisms of chemical reactions and processes for air quality modeling
• Production and decay of hazardous air pollutants (HCHO, acetaldehyde, acrolein, nitroPAHs)
• Reaction kinetics and mechanisms for heterogeneous chemistry that affect gas and aerosol compounds, including in-cloud chemistry
• Modeling assimilation techniques
• Land Surface Models
• Dust models

Session 2: Emissions Inventories, Models and Processes

This session is dedicated to the application of innovative methodologies for preparing and processing emissions for air quality modeling applications. Techniques to improve estimates of wild fires, dust and biogenic emissions, and temporal allocation of anthropogenic sources are of special interest for this session. Session topics include:

• Updates to inventories and emissions processing
• Emissions from alternative fuel use (e.g., bio-fuels in the transportation sector)
• Emissions from aviation activities
• Projection of emissions to future-year scenarios
• Inverse modeling
• Natural emission sources

Session 3: Air Quality, Climate and Energy

The energy system is currently responsible for the majority of U.S. emissions of criteria air pollutants, greenhouse gases, and short-lived climate forcing pollutants. Understanding how the energy system may evolve in the future and the resulting implications on the environment is critical if environmental decision-makers are to address these challenges proactively and efficiently.

The goal of this session is to highlight research efforts involved in exploring the linkages among air quality, climate and energy, with focus on supporting decision-making at federal, state or local levels. Among the topics that are appropriate for inclusion are:

• Scenario approaches for examining energy system futures, including exploring linkages between population growth, economic growth, land use change, climate change, technology change, policy and energy
• Impact of the future energy system on sustainability and vulnerability metrics
• Translating energy system modeling into climate and air quality impacts
• Identifying interactions between strategies for climate mitigation and air quality management, including quantification of co-benefits and holistic management strategies that simultaneously meet both goals
• Models, tools and methodologies for assessing air, climate and energy linkages

Session 4: Regulatory Modeling and SIP Applications

Air quality models continue to be important tools for guiding decision makers in preparing State Implementation Plan (SIP) applications to set standards for compliance. We seek abstracts that describe how air quality models are used in specific applications, with particular emphasis on the types of sensitivity and diagnostic analyses employed and on the model evaluation studies that were conducted for various applications. This session topics include (but are not limited to):

• Model intercomparison
• Statistical analyses and evaluation metrics
• Source apportionment modeling
• Impacts on air quality that result from controlling air pollutants
• Socioeconomic and health impacts

Session 5: Sensitivity of Air Quality Models to Meteorological Inputs

Appropriate simulations of meteorological conditions are key to the accuracy of modeling air quality since they affect processes such as transport, chemistry and deposition. The focus of this session is to report on advances on meteorological modeling for air quality at various scales (from urban to hemispheric). Topics of interest in this session include:

• Cloud and radiative processes
• Boundary layer schemes
• Scale and resolutions (physical and dynamical processes)
• Urban climate and air pollution
• Uncertainty assessments

Session 6: Global/Regional Modeling Applications

Both observations and modeling studies have demonstrated the long-range inter-continental transport of pollutants. Changes in emission patterns over different regions of the world are likely to exacerbate the impacts of long-range pollutant transport on background pollutant levels in another region, which may then impact the attainment of local air quality standards. Additionally, increased concerns of climate impacts on regional and local ecosystem disciplines have driven the need to utilize outputs from global models into regional modeling systems with different temporal and spatial scales. In such applications, downscaling approaches have been used to link the two modeling systems, with different physical and dynamical characteristics, to bridge the gap between global and local effects. This session seeks papers that discuss key issues related to the consistent coupling of atmospheric physical and chemical processes on local-to-global scales and related modeling applications. Topics of interest in this session include:

• Hemispheric chemistry transport models
• Global/Regional climate modeling applications
• Dynamical and statistical downscaling
• Case studies and modeling scenarios related to impacts on the ecosystem
• Model evaluation and inter-comparison
• Boundary influence of global modeling

Session 7: Fine Scale Modeling and Applications

This session will examine topics related to improving the characterization of fine-scale modeling approaches and the application of these approaches to areas including exposure assessments, attainment demonstrations and single-source impact assessments. (For our purposes, "fine scale" is defined as having horizontal resolution less than about 5 km.) Studies of interest include those based on photochemical grid models, Lagrangian models with chemistry, plume-in-grid models, meteorological models and dispersion models. The topics of this session include:

• Evaluation or development of fine-scale modeling techniques that identify limitations or successes of approaches for modeling at these scales
• Applications or methodological developments related to exposure assessments for ozone, PM2.5 and/or toxic materials
• Applications or methodological developments related to single-source impact assessments for ozone, PM2.5 and/or toxic materials
• Hybrid modeling approaches that involve combining fields for (a) primary and secondary pollutants, (b) grid-scale and sub-grid-scale outputs or (c) observations and model outputs

Session 8: Model Evaluation and Analysis

Evaluation of air quality modeling systems (including meteorological and emissions models) is a key to verify the integrity of such modeling systems for various applications at various spatial and temporal resolutions. Abstracts are invited that present results of model evaluation studies, with emphasis on new techniques for model evaluation. Session topics include:

• Diagnostic tools
• Analyses and comparisons with data from measurement networks
• Model intercomparisons
• Process evaluation, including dynamic evaluation

Session 9: Remote Sensing and Measurements Studies

Papers in this session are devoted to analyzing data from both conventional and remote-sensing observational platforms. In particular, presentations are invited on the integration of data collected from different platforms, and on the use of new satellite data products in air quality modeling. Session topics include:

• Satellite data
• Conventional measurement networks
• Field measurement studies
• Laboratory smog chamber experiments
• Aerosol detection and sampling
• Atmospheric transport and dispersion field data sets

Extended Abstracts

Extended abstracts should be submitted by October 24, 2016. All presenters (Oral and Poster) need to provide an extended abstract. The abstracts should be NO LONGER THAN 6 pages and should be submitted in PDF format. The abstract should include your name, affiliation, e-mail address, fax number, and phone number. Please e-mail your extended abstract to cmas@unc.edu with the subject line "Conference extended abstract" by October 24, 2016. Extended abstracts will not be accepted after November 1, 2016.

Extended Abstract Template: PDF or MS Word (.docx) (Remember to convert from MS Word (or other format) to PDF before sending to cmas@unc.edu!) /p>

Presenter Information

For more information about Oral Presentations, please visit our Oral Presentations page.

For more information on Poster Presentations, plese visit our Poster Session page.

Conference Info