Health / Air Quality

The GEOSS AIP-2 Air Quality and Health scenario envisions GEOSS facilitating two broad goals: building connections to facilitate movement of data between actors, and developing interoperable tools for intercomparison and fusion of a wide variety of atmospheric data. Readers are referred to the full version of the scenario for more details:

http://wiki.esipfed.org/index.php/AIP_AQ_Unified_Scenario

The scenario is focused on three end users:

• A policy-maker, needing synthesized information on the importance of intercontinental pollutant transport.
• An air quality manager, who needs to assess whether a regional pollution event was caused by an exceptional event.
• The public, needing information about air quality now and in the near future to make activity decisions.

While the scenario describes three distinct sets of end users, each depends upon common upstream actors and synthesized Earth observations. In fact, the common need for these synthesized atmospheric observations is a primary motivation for the structure of this scenario.

GEOSS AIP-2 Air Quality and Health SBA Engineering Report 

Scope: This Engineering Report describes how the Air Quality Workgroup used and tested the GEOSS Common Infrastructure (GCI) in order to register, discover, and access datasets relevant to air quality management. The AQ Workgroup adopted the convention that all AQ data must be accessible as an OGC WMS or WCS and developed a process to create  ISO 19115 metadata records for the AQ Community Catalog from WMS/WCS GetCapabilities documents. Using a service oriented architecture approach, data and metadata flows from the data providers through the GCI to the users. This methodology and infrastructure was demonstrated using a scenario entitled, "Southern California Smoke" which describes how air quality event  managers would use data available through GEOSS to predict and analyze the effect of smoke plumes on air quality during and after the Southern California Wildfire of October 2007. This demonstration is just one example of the broad capabilities of the infrastructure, which allows a single dataset to be reused for multiple decision support activities and supports a single decision support activity that needs multiple datasets.

Point of Contact Editor: Erin Robinson, Washington University - St. Louis

Contributing Editors:  David McCabe, EPA; Rudy Husar, Washington University - St. Louis; Stefan Falke, Northrop Grumman;

The final document is now available (pdf)