Examining emissions policy issues with an integrated assessment model

The Tracking and Analysis Framework, (TAF), an integrated assessment model developed by a multidisciplinary, multi-institutional team, is exercised to examine several national emissions policy issues, including the effects of reducing NOX emissions from automobiles (surface sources) vs. those of reducing NOX emissions from power plants (elevated sources), and the relative health, visibility, and ecological effects of SOX emissions reductions carried out with and without emissions trading (which results in a shift of where the emissions reductions occur). The effects quantified include health benefits, lake acidification changes, and visibility changes. TAF consists of a number of modules, including emissions, atmospheric pathways, visibility, soils and aquatic effects, health effects, and valuation, which are reduced-form models for efficiency in execution on a desktop environment, but which are based on more detailed offline models. The effect of uncertainties in various components of particular modules can be tracked through the entire TAF. The offline model on which the atmospheric pathways module is based is the ASTRAP model. The advantages and limitations of the reduced-form model, here a large set of source-receptor transfer matrices, are discussed, and the module is used to backcast with known emission patterns, which can be compared with deposition or concentration observations, and to forecast with projected emission patterns.