| This dissertation explores the relationship between motor vehicle emissions and the human inhalation intake of these emissions. Motor vehicles are ubiquitous to urban areas throughout the world. In most urban areas, vehicle emission are a significant contributor to air pollution problems. Inhalation of vehicle emissions has been shown to cause a number of adverse health effects. Better understanding of the relationship between emissions and inhalation will aid in designing effective strategies to reduce air pollution health effects. Understanding the emission-to-inhalation relationship is also important for estimating the total health impacts attributable emissions from a specific air pollution source, such as motor vehicles in a specific city.; Three objectives of his dissertation are (1) to quantify the emission-to-inhalation relationship in a way that is useful to other air quality and health researchers and to policy analysts; (2) to employ a variety of analytic approaches, in order to understand better the relative strengths and weakness of each approach; and (3) to demonstrate that the conclusions one draws from air quality analyses may depend on whether one uses as the figure-of-merit inhalation of air pollution, as is done for analyses in this work, or other common air quality metrics such as mass emission rate, ambient concentrations, or concentration at the location of the maximally exposed individual.; The methods employed here include several data analysis and modeling approaches. The data analyses incorporate a range of inputs, including results from air dispersion models of varying sophistication, tracer-gas experiments, and "tracers of opportunity" (gases that are emitted primarily by one source or source category). The inhalation model that I develop in Chapter 6 simulates the movement of people through an urban area, tracking the individual or population inhalation rate during simulated activities (e.g., shopping, driving, cooking).; The specific research topics considered in this work are as follows. In the first portion of this dissertation (Chapters 1--5), I generate estimates for a summary inhalation metric, called intake fraction, for vehicle emissions in urban areas. In the second portion (Chapters 6--7), I first develop a mobility-based GIS inhalation model for urban air pollution, and then, separately, consider how changes in urban population and land area would influence population inhalation of private passenger emissions. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)... |
