Quantifying Future Ozone-Related Mortality Under Climate Change and Methods to Incorporate Uncertainty in Future Ozone Exposures

• Activity Number: 116
• Type: Topic Contributed
• Date/Time: Monday, August 10, 2015 : 8:30 AM to 10:20 AM
• Sponsor: Section on Statistics and the Environment
• Author(s): Stacey Alexeeff* and Doug Nychka and Gabriele Pfister
• Companies: National Center for Atmospheric Research and National Center for Atmospheric Research and National Center for Atmospheric Research
• Keywords: air pollution ; global warming ; environmental epidemiology

Abstract

Climate change is expected to have many impacts on the environment, and a key public health concern is ozone-related summertime mortality rates if climate change leads to increasing surface ozone concentrations. Previous health impact studies have not incorporated the variability of ozone into their models. We propose a Bayesian model for quantifying health effects of future ozone. The key model features are (i) the propagation of uncertainty in both the health effect and the ozone projections and (ii) use of the empirical distribution of the daily ozone projections to account for their variation. We use interpolation to improve the accuracy of averaging ozone exposures over the irregular shaped county regions, and we compare the MSE to other linear interpolators. By carefully staging our computations and using efficient and parallel data analysis tools we are able to handle a very large volume model output and still do relevant computations on a daily time scale. We quantify the expected change in ozone-related summertime mortality in the contiguous United States between 2000 and 2050 under a changing climate, and we compare two future emissions scenarios.