The objective of this work was to evaluate the environmental impact of growing megacity emissions on global and Asian environment. With less than 2% of the land covered by the megacities and harboring more than 30% of Asian population, they are producing an average of 15% of the anthropogenic trace gas and aerosol emissions affecting all or portion of the region surrounding them. Increasing urbanization will contribute more to these growing environmental and human health concerns in the future. The modeling activities were conducted regional scale model – STEM, with a full scale chemical mechanism (SAPRC99) and 3-dimensional eulerian transport scheme, to quantify and understand the chemistry of megacity emissions and their impact on global, regional and local environments. Results were evaluted for the period of the NASA GTE TRACE-P field experiment of 2001.

This is a mounting evidence that long-range transport of air pollutants from a few point or grid sources will impact regions thousands of miles away. If not checked, growing contributions are expected to cause extensive environmental damage and reduce agricultural production through acidification of soils and water. Since the urban centers are the first to react to any regulations, raising human health impacts will have increasing environmental policy implications as the developing countries rapidly industrialize and their air pollutant emissions increase.

* Publication in Journal of Geophysical Research, American Geophysical Union, Washington DC, USA (2005)
* Publication in Air Pollution Modeling and Its Applications XV, Kluwer Academic Publishers, New York (2002)
* Poster presented at American Geophysical Union, San Francisco, USA (December 2001)
* ACESS Chemical and Weather Forecasting Systems at CGRER, The University of Iowa, Iowa City, USA (February-April 2001)