Use Of Trajectory Models To Track Air Pollution From Source To Exposure: A Methodological Approach For Identifying Communities At Risk

Objective Ongoing environmental changes increasingly require public health nurses to understand how environmental factors impact the health of populations. One approach to researching these impacts is incorporating environmental research methods to determine associations between harmful exposures and health. We use the Salton Sea in Southern California as a demonstration of how environmental exposure can be examined using air parcel trajectory analysis.Design We demonstrate a methodology for public health nurses to better understand and apply data from the Hybrid Single-Particle Lagrangian Integrated Trajectory meteorological model to estimate the effect of airborne particulate matter from a single source.Measurements We explain a method for tracking air parcel trajectories to populations: selection of meterological data to identify air parcels, geographic identification of population centers, generation of trajectories, classification of trajectory dispersions, adjusting for atmospheric stability, and merging environmental variables with health data.Conclusions Climate change-related environmental events are expected to become more commonplace and disproportionately affect those populations impacted by health disparities. Public health nurses can identify communities at risk so that public health nursing researchers can use these techniques in collaboration with environmental science to robustly examine health effects of proximal air pollution sources for communities at risk.