Air Quality Information Systems and geoss: Applications to India

Technical Scope of Proposed Effort

The work proposed is a collaboration among India and US organizations to develop a prototype integrated air quality information system for India, which is linked to the GEOSS GCI both as an information provider and as a user. The project is expected to encompass three primary activity areas:

1. 
   Community Building
   
2. 
   Advancement of Information Infrastructure, and
   
3. 
   Enhancement of Decision Support Systems
   

Community Building

 A Community of Practice (CoP) is a user-led community of stakeholders, from providers to the final beneficiaries of Earth observation data and information, with a common interest in specific aspects of societal benefits to be realized by GEOSS implementation. Based on experiences with the Federation of Earth Science Information Partners (ESIP) Air Quality Workgroup in the United States, and the emerging GEO Air Quality Community of Practice (GEO AQ CoP), a key objective of the proposed effort is to initiate an India Air Quality Community of Practice (IAQ CoP) that could coordinate with peer-level CoPs, such as ESIP and contribute to the international GEO AQ CoP. Discussions and interactions that stemmed from the development of this GEO Decision Support proposal have already initiated efforts to form the India AQ CoP and interest across the India air quality community is high. The proposed project will help formalize the IAQ CoP and to apply GEOSS principles and best practices.

Using and enhancing the concept of the GEO AQ CoP to develop a process for engaging organizations in a collaborative environment across the Indian air quality research, management and policy communities as well as the global air quality community. Community building includes fostering education and outreach via demonstrations, workshops and training courses to aid in more widespread use of GEOSS and related systems, and to iteratively improve the process at multiple stages of the project using the feedback from the user community. The community building activity addresses the task of engaging local resources in the development of the new decision support system, and will be led by the principal team members in India. The efforts would be directed through the following sub-tasks:

1) Identifying stakeholders, such as air quality researchers and managers in India, and mobilizing information, infrastructure and financial resources

2) Conducting workshops to build capacity for access and utilization of Earth Science Observations for decision-support,

3) Working with stakeholders in indentifying decision-making activities and defining applications in support of decision-making activities (not sure I understand the rest of the sentence) and engaging in the providing and accessing of data,

4) Setting up India-specific structures to establish and sustain an IAQ-CoP.

The key stakeholders for the IAQ CoP may be comprised of Government of India (Ministry of Environment and Forests), Central Pollution Control Board (CPCB), State Pollution Control Boards (SPCB’s), Academic Institutes (IITs, IISc, Universities, NITs), Research Institutes (NEERI, IITM, Pune, CDAC), Indian Meteorological Department (IMD), Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), Practitioners (Industries, Consultants), Professional bodies (IEA) and other groups, all of whom are to be invited to participate.

The principal team members from India, foresee that the IAQ CoP will begin to engage and coordinate around questions, such as storage, presentation, sharing data, and use of currently available CPCB data; How best to supplement the SPCB procedures for utilization of the CPCB monitoring network for their decision making; Use of SPCB inventory data industry by industry; data system for area and line sources; where are modeling efforts located , and for scales that are (a) local (b) regional (c) global use of satellite data from ISRO and its usage; need for an operational speciation network with resolution in terms of chemical composition for PM measurements; geographic coverage for urban, rural and background air quality; need to establish the role that the region has to play in the global decision making for global decisions

The IAQ-CoP will be created through scheduling occasions for structured national and regional level symposiums and meetings. The theme area will be “Practices and Structures for Sustained Air Quality Management in India” and will be supported through commitments from the GOI, Industry and hosted by academic institutions. Stakeholders will be invited to participate in the first such event, which will include brain storming, establishing a need for systemic approach, demonstrations, sharing from GEOSS experiences, and formulation of pathway for the work in India. This event will be followed by two similar events where the progress and accomplishments will be shared. In addition to these events, specific specialty workshops will be conducted on a more frequent and geographically dispersed schedule throughout the country as described in the next section. While such physical meetings are felt as a need at the initial stages of the formation of CoP, the mode of such meetings would be augmented and phased into a virtual mode through suitable collaboration technologies.

Education and Outreach

An important part of the community-building will be accomplished via end-user training activities.  All training activities will provide hands-on experience with model, satellite, and surface inter-comparisons.  We will also provide end users in India with the skills needed for leveraging the GEOSS Common Infrastructure in order to find and access distributed Earth Science data and tools.  The workshops will be designed to address using multiple types of information (surface observations, satellite observations, emissions models, and air quality models) for conducing air quality analyses and assessments and for conducting those assessments within the GOESS and Air Quality Community Information Infrastructures.  The satellite workshops will have three main components a) Atmospheric satellite remote sensing basics b) Accessing Earth Science Observations via  the GEOSS Common Infrastructure and other online tools; c) Using Satellite Observations, GEOSS Common Infrastructure and web tools for decision-support via hands-on Case Studies.  Satellite trainings will be conducted following the structure of existing NASA Applied Sciences Program Training Workshops (Prados et. al., 2010a) to include hands-on activities for online access, visualization and analysis of satellite imagery. The second type of training will provide in-depth workshops on air quality modeling ,  complementary to the CMAS training to community end users on the use of the air quality models relevant to the India with an emphasis on their synergistic use with Earth observations.  Case Studies on utilization of both satellite and model data will be prepared specifically for India applications to include different types of pollution episodes, which a decision-maker may encounter in India such as long-range transport of industrial pollution or dust storms.