Estimating the Acute Health Impacts of Fire-Originated PM2.5 Exposure During the 2017 California Wildfires: Sensitivity to Choices of Inputs
As the number of methods for assessing air pollution exposure proliferate there is a need to understand the utility of these metrics (and their uncertainties) for characterizing exposures in determining potential public health outcomes at different spatial and temporal resolutions. Past efforts to combine reference level monitoring data, air sensor data, and/or satellite data have been limited in the sample size used, the time periods of exposure, and the health effects assessed; all factors which may play an important role in determining how various exposure methods function in evaluating potential public health impacts. This product will provide two assessments using different health data at different geographic scales. The first assessment focuses on the use of more than 100,000 observations from electronic health records and other health records data in a defined geographic area (NC and SC) covering both rural and urban areas to determine the concordance between air pollution monitors, satellites, chemical transport models, and sensor networks for assessing health effects at multiple time scales. The second will use Medicare electronic health records and include a nationwide assessment of exposure estimates from emission-based models [Community Multi-scale Air Quality Model (CMAQ)], a satellite-based remote sensor [TROPOspheric Monitoring Instrument (TROPOMI)], and state or local air quality monitoring stations (SLAMS). These novel exposure estimates will be assessed as both short-term and long-term determinants of cardiovascular health in the elderly. This product will address the partners’ needs to understand how different air quality data sets can be combined to estimate exposures and assess public health for both at-risk populations and the general population. In addition, this product will support the need for informing health messaging for air pollutants which is especially important during pollution events (e.g., wildland fires, volcanic eruptions).