Natural background visibility and regional haze goals in the southeastern United States

The goal of the regional haze mitigation program in the United States is to attain "natural conditions" in national parks and wilderness areas by 2064. Results of research investigations on background concentrations of sea salt and biogenic organic matter, of episodic Saharan and Asian dust, and of carbon from natural fires were reviewed to provide a basis for making site-specific estimates of what the concentrations of atmospheric fine particulate matter components might be under natural conditions in the Southeastern United States. Based on this review, rough estimates were made of potential contributions of these aerosol components to natural background visibility. Natural organic particles were the dominant influence on the rate of visibility improvement required to reach natural conditions at an inland, mountainous location, and organic particles and sea salt were the dominant influences on the rate at a coastal location. African dust also had a large episodic effect, but the current regulatory approach is not designed to address episodic background variations. Insufficient data exist to quantify the contributions of wildfires with any detail, although global air pollution modeling provides insight, and their emissions can be locally dominant. Conservative regional refinements to the default natural background estimates do not greatly alter the region-wide rates of reduction of ambient particulate matter concentrations that will be needed to accomplish the first phase of the regional haze program. However, refinements at specific Class I areas may have considerable influence on defining the nature (magnitude and spatial and temporal distribution) of local emission reduction efforts there.