The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) 2017 International Emission Inventory Conference will be held at the Hyatt Regency Baltimore on the Inner Harbor Hotel in Baltimore, MD August 14-18, 2017.

This year’s conference will focus on how emission inventories meet the challenges posed by improving emissions inventory science and also streamline inventory creation processes to improve the resulting inventories. Topics of interest include:

• How inventories can be used to assess the impacts of long-range transport on local National Ambient Air Quality Standards (NAAQS) and other air quality issues;
• How do key sectors in the Northeastern/Eastern U.S., including oil & gas, stationary sources, and other area sources affect local and regional air quality;
• What are the current challenges in estimating emissions for key sectors? How can we improve emission estimates for these key sectors in inventories?
• How can we leverage work going on at the regional and local levels to inform the National Emissions Inventory? What are the challenges state, local, and tribal air Agencies face in developing an emissions inventory? How do they prioritize the resources they have for inventory development?
• How are issues for the NAAQS connected to emissions of greenhouse gases? How can both air quality improvement and global warming mitigation be considered in emissions methods?
• What are the key emissions inventory issues related to NAAQS issues in the Eastern US? What are key issues associated with the National Air Toxics Assessment (NATA) and air toxics?
• How does the Combined Air Emissions Reporting (CAER) project potentially impact EI planning and development?
• What are some of the advantages to using the Lean approach to improve different aspects of inventory development?; Have you seen the effects of a “Leaned” process improving inventory development, submissions, or review?
• How can EPA make the NEI process easier for the SLTs to do their work in submitting/reviewing/finalizing emission inventories, while ensuring high quality?
• How do SLTs use inventories for modeling (higher spatial and temporal resolutions)? What does modeling tell us about gaps or potential improvements in emission inventories?

Our conference will provide a useful forum for the exchange of ideas and information on the development and uses of emissions data. Participating organizations are expected to include state, local, tribal, regional, international agencies/researchers, industry and academia.

General Topics of Interest: The following list provides examples of specific topics/sessions of interest to the audience for this conference.

• Quality assurance of key sectors in the National Emissions Inventory (ambient data comparisons, inverse modeling techniques, source tagging techniques, etc.)
• Use of geographic information systems (GIS) and other innovative tools for inventory development, and/or QA of inventories
• Use of top-down and bottom-up methods to improve emission factors for a given sector/source category
• Use of ambient and satellite data to develop, QA, and analyze emission inventories
• Improvement of meta-data reporting and review as part of emission inventory submittal
• Ways to improve data sharing and availing data to a variety of end users
• Improved methods to allocate annual/county emissions to higher resolutions needed for driving air quality models
• Ways to improve control information in the NEI (updates, review, and handling)
• Oil and Gas emissions
  • Effects on air quality
  • Emissions Factors in Oil and Gas inventories: how representative are national averages?
  • Reconciling state data to data in national databases: EIA, HDIP, etc.
• Ways to improve biomass burning emission estimates: wild, prescribed and agricultural fires.
• Use of emission inventory data in specific regulatory setting (exceptional event demonstrations, NAAQS analysis, designations, etc.
• Approaches for using localized information be used to better estimate agricultural emissions in the western and other parts of the U.S.

Possible Sessions:

• Speciation improvements for volatile organic compounds (VOCs) and PM2.5
• Emission inventory development and challenges in the agricultural sectors
• Innovative EI Development/QA Methods and Data Analysis
• Stationary Sources
• Emission Factors
• EI Development and preparation for Air Quality modeling
• Global/International Inventory Issues, including GHGs
• Air Toxic
• Tools development for improving development, display and review of emission inventories
• Tribal Inventories and Issues
• New Technology - GIS, Satellites and other remote sensing tools used in EI development and review
• Emission Projections
• GHGs, including methane, BC and other short-lived climate forcer
• Improving Oil and Gas Emissions Inventories
• Biomass Burning: what are the new frontiers?
• Use of air quality monitoring data and satellite data in helping develop, QA, and work with EI data
• Mobile Sources (including aircraft, rail and ports)
• Emissions and their role in explaining observed or modeled air quality levels
• Combined Air Emissions Reporting (CAER) Project/LEAN Processes
• Streamlining Processes for developing Emission Inventories

Invitation to Submit Ideas for Special-Topic Sessions
In addition to the topics and potential sessions listed above, if you have ideas about session topics that could benefit the emissions inventory community, please let us know, this includes planning round table discussions or panels that fit the theme of this Conference. If you make a suggestion, please be very specific about the topic and the interested audience (broad EI community vs narrower audience) and suggest too how you think it could be delivered within the technical program. Such special topics might be woven into the technical program as a new session area, panel discussion forums, lunchtime informational sessions/seminars, as an add-on to the plenary session, or as an Internet-Web session. Please email your specific ideas by January 25, 2017 to Tesh Rao, at EIC2017@epa.gov.

Abstract Submission Procedures