ABSTRACT: India is notorious for its poor ambient air quality; it’s also the world’s third-leading carbon emitter. Thus assessing strategies to reduce air pollutant and carbon emissions and their successful implementation can achieve air quality, climate, and subsequent health and economic benefits. In this seminar, I will present research on two projects that utilize state-of-the-science modeling frameworks to assess technological and policy interventions on local/regional air quality and carbon emissions.
Project 1: The Taj Mahal is a global icon, but has become discolored in time due to air pollutants depositing to its surface. Here, I will overview a “top-down” source apportionment study and a “bottom-up” dispersion modeling study that demonstrate that biomass burning, including garbage and dung cake burning, is the main contributor to the Taj’s discoloration.
Project 2: Traditional approaches to reduce air pollutant and carbon emissions have been from single-sector interventions, e.g., adding control technologies, switching fuels, etc. However, more novel, circular-economy strategies that take outputs from one activity as input to another have been proposed as an intermediate solution to emission reduction and material conservation outcomes. Here, I will introduce and assess the impact of multi- and single-sector waste-heat reuse pathways and a coal fly-ash material exchange pathway on nationwide PM2.5-air quality (modeled using a chemical transport model) and carbon emission reductions.
BIO: Raj Lal received his BS in Mechanical Engineering from Purdue University. He received his PhD in Environmental Engineering from Georgia Tech, where his thesis “Improved Air Quality from Sustainable City Development in the United States, India, and China” earned the A&WMA field-wide best thesis award. He then completed a post-doc at the University of Michigan and is currently a Fulbright-Kalam Climate Grantee at IIT-Bombay where he will investigate the role of transboundary emissions to urban PM2.5 across National Clean Air Program (NCAP) cities.