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Project Overview
National Parks, Forests and Wilderness Areas are treasured by tens of millions of visitors each year for their scenic vistas and clean air. Degradation of visibility caused by anthropogenic air pollutants at these sites reduces the quality of experience for visitors and also harms the economic interests of cities and industries which rely heavily on tourism income. The Clean Air Act establishes special goals for protection of visibility in many national parks and wilderness areas. Through the 1977 amendments to the Clean Air Act (CAA), Congress set a national goal for visibility as "the prevention of any future, and the remedying of any existing, impairment of visibility in mandatory Class I Federal areas which impairment results from manmade air pollution". The Clean Air Act defines mandatory Class I Federal areas as national parks (over 6000 acres), wilderness areas (over 5000 acres), national memorial parks (over 5000 acres), and international parks that were in existence as of August 1977. The CAA requires that natural visibility conditions be attained in Class I areas by 2064, and also establishes certain requirements for making progress toward attainment at that date. States and tribes have authority under the CAA to develop State and Tribal Implementation Plans (SIPs and TIPs) to attain the CAA visibility standards for these Class I Areas.
VISTAS has selected ENVIRON Corporation, the University of California, and Alpine Geopyhics LLC to perform air quality modeling and to evaluate model science congifurations to identify the model configuration that best simulates regional haze in the southeaster US. This website provides access to the datasets and model results that are being used for the VISTAS model evaluation process.
Download Project Documents:VISTAS Modeling Domains
- Download plots of domains and vertical layers (PDF file)
- CMAQ 36 km domain with nested in the MM5 36 km domain
- CMAQ 36 km domain with nested CMAQ 12 km domain
- CMAQ 12 km domain
- Proposed Layer Averaging for 18L or 19L CMAQ (excel spreadsheet)
VISTAS Simulation Periods
Maps Showing Locations of Class I Areas
- National Park Service Areas - PDF (requires Adobe Acrobat Reader)
- National Forest Service Areas - PDF
- Fish and Wildlife Service Areas - PDF
- American Indian Class I Areas -PDF