A spatial causal analysis of wildland fire-contributed PM₂.5 using numerical model output

DOI10.1214/22-AOAS1610zbMATH Open1498.62286arXiv2003.06037OpenAlexW3012162383MaRDI QIDQ2080787FDOQ2080787

Brian J. Reich, Shu Yang, Ana G. Rappold, Alexandra Larsen

Publication date: 10 October 2022

Published in: The Annals of Applied Statistics (Search for Journal in Brave)

Abstract: Wildland fire smoke contains hazardous levels of fine particulate matter PM2.5, a pollutant shown to adversely effect health. Estimating fire attributable PM2.5 concentrations is key to quantifying the impact on air quality and subsequent health burden. This is a challenging problem since only total PM2.5 is measured at monitoring stations and both fire-attributable PM2.5 and PM2.5 from all other sources are correlated in space and time. We propose a framework for estimating fire-contributed PM2.5 and PM2.5 from all other sources using a novel causal inference framework and bias-adjusted chemical model representations of PM2.5 under counterfactual scenarios. The chemical model representation of PM2.5 for this analysis is simulated using Community Multi-Scale Air Quality Modeling System (CMAQ), run with and without fire emissions across the contiguous U.S. for the 2008-2012 wildfire seasons. The CMAQ output is calibrated with observations from monitoring sites for the same spatial domain and time period. We use a Bayesian model that accounts for spatial variation to estimate the effect of wildland fires on PM2.5 and state assumptions under which the estimate has a valid causal interpretation. Our results include estimates of absolute, relative and cumulative contributions of wildfire smoke to PM2.5 for the contiguous U.S. Additionally, we compute the health burden associated with the PM2.5 attributable to wildfire smoke.

Full work available at URL: https://arxiv.org/abs/2003.06037

zbMATH Keywords

Bayesian analysisinterferencespillover effectdownscaling

Mathematics Subject Classification ID

Bayesian inference (62F15) Inference from spatial processes (62M30) Applications of statistics to environmental and related topics (62P12)

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• A spatial causal analysis of wildland fire-contributed \(\mathrm{PM}_{2.5}\) using numerical model output

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