VIEWS

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General

Contact

Data System Name: VIEWS
Data System URL: http://vista.cira.colostate.edu/views/
Contact Person: Shawn McClure
Contact e-mail: mcclure@cira.colostate.edu

About the Data System (Purposes, Audience)

[[About::

The Visibility Information Exchange Web System (VIEWS) is an online decision support system developed to help federal land managers (FLMs) and states evaluate air quality and improve visibility in federally-protected ecosystems according to the stringent requirements of the EPA’s Regional Haze Rule and the National Ambient Air Quality Standards. VIEWS was recently selected by the Western Regional Air Partnership (WRAP), a collaboration of western states, tribes, and local agencies administered by the Western Governor’s Association and the National Tribal Environmental Council, to serve as the infrastructure for the WRAP Technical Support System (TSS). The TSS is an extended suite of analysis and planning tools designed to help planners develop long term emissions control strategies for achieving natural visibility conditions in Class I Areas by 2064. The architected combination of VIEWS and the TSS represents an integrated system that supports a unique synergy of national and regional air quality objectives by providing a consolidated, online system of data access and decision-making tools to planners, researchers, stakeholders, policy makers, and federal agencies across the nation.

VIEWS/TSS employs an advanced data acquisition and import system to integrate data from several air quality data centers into a single, highly-optimized data warehouse. Ground-based measurements from dozens of monitoring networks, air quality modeling results, and detailed emissions inventories are imported and updated on a regular basis using a generalized, uniform data model and carefully standardized metadata. Names, codes, units, and quality flags from the source datasets are carefully mapped to a unified paradigm, and native formats and organizations are transformed into a common, normalized database schema. This design enables users to explore, merge, and analyze datasets of widely-varying origin in a consistent, unified manner with a common set of tools and web services. This degree of interoperability allows decision-makers to analyze diverse datasets side-by-side and focus on high-level planning strategies without having to contend with the details of data management and manipulation.

VIEWS/TSS users are typically asking questions of “What pollutants are impacting a given area?” and “Where are these pollutants coming from?” States are further mandated to answer the question of “What can be done to reduce these impacts?”, because the Regional Haze Rule requires states and tribes to develop implementation plans for reducing emissions and demonstrating reasonable progress towards doing so, and these plans must provide for an improvement during the 20% worst visibility days while also ensuring no degradation during the 20% best visibility days. To accomplish this, users must identify the pollutants, quantify their amounts, and determine the sources of anthropogenic emissions that contribute to this pollution on both the “best” and the “worst” visibility days in a given area. They must then determine available control measures for each source and evaluate these measures on the basis of costs, time, energy and environmental impacts, and the remaining life of the source. Planners then employ these analyses to make decisions about what controls to implement, to estimate projected improvements, and to track their progress in reaching these goals. The resulting decisions have obvious ecological impacts, but can also have important political and economic impacts in the sense that deciding which sources to control is a politically-significant issue and the process of controlling emissions and tracking progress costs money and takes time.

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Presentation

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History

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Agencies

RPOs, NPS, WRAP, CIRA

Datasets Served

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Parameters

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Spatial - Temporal Coverage

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Health

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Forecasting and Reanalysis

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Model/Emissions Evaluation

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Characterization, Trends, Accountability

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Other

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Data System IT

Primary/Official Store for Some data

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Data Consolidation/integration

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Providing Data Access to users/externals

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Data Processing

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Visualization/Analysis

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Decision Support (e.g. some integration into user business process)

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End-to-End Integration

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Other DS Values

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Data Access and/or Output Interoperability

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Reusable Tools and Methods

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Security Barriers and Solutions

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User Feedback Approach

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Other Architecture

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