Publications by authors named "S M Raffuse"
Absorption photometry of patterned deposits on IMPROVE PTFE filters.
J Air Waste Manag Assoc
December 2024
The IMPROVE program (Interagency Monitoring of PROtected Visual Environments) tracks long-term trends in the composition and optics of regional haze aerosols in the United States. The absorptance of red (633-nm) light is monitored by filter photometry of 24 h-integrated samples of fine particulate matter (PM 2.5).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFArticle Synopsis
- * Organic aerosols were found to be the most significant contributor to PM mass, accounting for over 40% annually, with biomass smoke influencing particulate organic matter and elemental carbon levels.
- * Seasonal variations in aerosol species were notable, particularly for particulate organic matter, fine dust, and ammonium nitrate, pointing to the need for further evaluation of how urban and rural emissions affect aerosol concentrations and atmospheric conditions.
Article Synopsis
- - The study examines how exposure to wildfire smoke impacts immune responses in individuals receiving the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine, focusing on the role of Natural Killer (NK) cells.
- - Researchers analyzed blood samples from 52 participants before and after vaccine administration during heavy wildfire smoke events, finding variations in IgG antibody levels associated with air quality.
- - Results indicate that wildfire smoke exposure may disrupt immune function by affecting NK cell activity, leading to reduced vaccine efficacy over time.
Urban smoke exposure events from large wildfires have become increasingly common in California and throughout the western United States. The ability to study the impacts of high smoke aerosol exposures from these events on the public is limited by the availability of high-quality, spatially resolved estimates of aerosol concentrations. Methods for assigning aerosol exposure often employ multiple data sets that are time-consuming to create and difficult to reproduce.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFSmoke impacts from large wildfires are mounting, and the projection is for more such events in the future as the one experienced October 2017 in Northern California, and subsequently in 2018 and 2020. Further, the evidence is growing about the health impacts from these events which are also difficult to simulate. Therefore, we simulated air quality conditions using a suite of remotely-sensed data, surface observational data, chemical transport modeling with WRF-CMAQ, one data fusion, and three machine learning methods to arrive at datasets useful to air quality and health impact analyses.
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