Annual Virginia Emissions Data Via EPA MOVES Model

The MOtor Vehicle Emissions Simulator (MOVES) model is an emissions modeling system produced by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) that estimates mobile source emissions for criteria air pollutants, greenhouse gases, and air toxics. Results can be produced at the national, county, or project level. MOVES combines emissions factors (processed by state-provided data in MOVES) and meteorological data to produce county-level emissions totals. For off-road vehicle data, a national emissions database provided by the EPA is processed in MOVES to produce annual county-level emissions outputs. MOVES data can then be processed in R Studio to produce a visualization, competitively mapping annual emissions amounts in each Virginia county to produce a map of the state.

Today I’ll be walking through how I used the Environmental Protection Agency’s MOVES model to estimate annual emissions for relevant pollutants, as well as show some visualizations produced from the outputted data from MOVES. To give some background, MOVES or the MOtor Vehicle Emissions Simulator model is an emissions modeling system produced by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) that estimates mobile source and off-road source emissions for criteria air pollutants, greenhouse gases, and air toxics. Results can be produced at the national, county, or project level, such as down to a road or bridge. In my case, it is most relevant to look at the county level in order to analyze total emissions for select pollutants in the state of Virginia. For example, if we want data for the year of 2011 for off-road source emissions, we will first choose the nonroad scale model at the default scale. After that we would select the year 2011, we would choose all months and all days for a 24-time period. We would then choose the state of Virginia, choose all counties, and select all fuel and emissions sectors. We would choose our road type as nonroad, and these four relevant pollutants. We would define our output database, as well as input database, and aggregate the data for each Virginia county with a default aggregation time of day. We would then execute the run. This is an example of what data output may look like if we had analyzed the year 2011 for the total annual emissions for particulate matter 2.5. You have the year ID on the leftmost column, and next to that is the FIPs county ID for each Virginia county, where each of these 5-digit codes correlate to a Virginia county, and then the total annual emissions for that county measured in tons. This is an example of what the MOVES data can be used to create. This is a visualization of total annual PM2.5 emissions for off-road sources for each Virginia county created via R Studio. Each shade of red represents the amount of Pm2.5 emissions comparatively between each county, with the darkest shades of red representing some the highest annual emissions in the state.