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NARSTO Workshop on Innovative Methods for Emission Inventory Development and Evaluation University of Texas, Austin October 14-17, 2003 |
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Compilation and Design of a Distributed Emissions Database of North American Electric Generating Utilities
Gregory Stella
Alpine Geophysics
Stefan Falke
Washington University in St. Louis
Terry Keating
US EPA - Office of Air & Radiation
In an age of international air quality agreements and annexes, a real need is seen for a state-of-knowledge application of emission inventories for purposes of public outreach, emission trends reporting, fulfilling data requests, control strategy application studies, benefit analyses, and estimating air quality in large regional areas. However, without consistent emission data sets within the domain of study, results of these applications can be speculative, at best. The Commission for Environmental Cooperation (CEC) has been working closely with North American federal environmental agencies to try and gather the latest emissions data which can be used to sure up these end results.
The objective of this study is to recommend and demonstrate to the CEC approaches for the comparability of techniques and methodologies for data gathering and analysis, data management, and electronic data communications for promoting access to publicly available environmental information held by public authorities of each of the three participating countries. We have identified, acquired, and compiled available power plant data from across North America and used these data in demonstrating the functionality of a distributed emissions database. A “mapping” of emissions data among country inventories was applied in accessing disparate emissions data and in designing an integrated relational database. Web browser interfaces provide functionality for querying, retrieving, and exploring the relational databases.