Dr. William Porter is presenting at the Postdoc Seminar Series on on March 12th. His presentation is titled “Sun, stats, and smog: meteorological drivers of air-quality extremes”.
ABSTRACT: Relationships between regional weather conditions and pollutant concentrations have been studied extensively over the years, and many general patterns have been established in terms of meteorological impacts on pollutant production, transport, and removal. However, some of our best modeling efforts still show significant biases, suggesting that we may still be missing key pieces of the puzzle. Furthermore, since pollutant level distributions in highly polluted areas tend to be extremely heavy-tailed, statistical analyses of these relationships focused on mean behavior may fail to capture important differences between drivers of typical pollutant behavior and drivers of the extremes. Here I will share some of the work I’ve done examining observed meteorology and air quality in the United States using quantile regression and extreme value theory in an attempt to identify regional and quantile differences in driver importance and magnitude.
BIO: Dr. William Porter is a postdoctoral associate with the Heald Lab in the department of Civil and Environmental Engineering. He earned his PhD in 2013 from Portland State University, where he studied the air-quality consequences of large-scale land-use change related to bioenergy crop cultivation.