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Air Pathway Analysis

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Environmental Modeling and Health Risk Analysis (Acts/Risk)

Abstract

As our societies become more centralized in and around large population centers and as the demand for energy, food, water and technological need increases proportional to an exponentially increasing population of the world, air pollution and its adverse health effects outcome will continue to be an important concern. Relatively speaking, the pollution of environmental media such as water, soil and plants are not as critical as the pollution of air, which we need to breathe regularly. This is because the other environmental media such as water, soil and plants can be processed, remediated or treated before we come into contact with them. On the other hand, air has to be clean anywhere and everywhere that we go, and it cannot be isolated, other than probably indoor air, if it needs to be treated. Thus, source control is the most effective remedy for the control of air pollution. In the United States the regulatory branches of the government started addressing air pollution problems during the early 1960s with the enactment of the Clean Air Act followed by its subsequent amendments in 1963, 1966, 1970, 1977 and 1990. Early regulations focused on point sources such as emissions from smoke stacks originating from industrial, commercial or power plants. Later on these regulations were extended to cover distributed sources originating from roads and highways and indoor air pollution which could originate from natural diffusion of environmental contaminants, uncirculated indoor conditions or circulation based dispersion of contamination sources. Whatever is the source, indoor and outdoor air pollution is a major health concern and we need to understand and evaluate contaminant migration patterns in this environmental pathway.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology, 790 Atlantic Dr. NW, Mason Bldg., Atlanta, Georgia, 30332-0355, USA

    Prof. Mustafa M. Aral

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  1. Prof. Mustafa M. Aral
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Correspondence to Mustafa M. Aral .

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Aral, M.M. (2010). Air Pathway Analysis. In: Environmental Modeling and Health Risk Analysis (Acts/Risk). Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-8608-2_4

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