Integrating Geographic Information Systems for Transportation and Air Quality Models for Microscale Analysis

The inherently spatial nature of transportation-related air quality analysis makes the geographic information system (GIS) particularly well suited to enhancing microscale air quality analysis. GIS provides several features ideal for the type of analysis necessary to determine transportation-related air quality impacts. It is an excellent storage, manipulation, modeling, and mapping tool for spatial data. Spatial information such as street coordinates and accompanying attributes can be exported and manipulated as input to air quality models such as CALINE3 and CAL3QHC. Output from air quality models in the form of pollution concentrations at specified receptor locations can be input to GIS for hot-spot identification, estimation of contributions of off-road mobile sources, and impact analysis. GIS tools applied to air quality analysis include contour generation, classification, thematic analysis, point-in-polygon analysis, and polygon overlay. Several case studies demonstrating these capabilities using TR...