Pacific Southwest Research Station

Impacts of vehicle activity on airborne particle deposition to Lake Tahoe

Principal Investigators:
Hampden Kuhns, Desert Research Institute
John Gillies, Desert Research Institute
Alan Gertler, Desert Research Institute

Proposal [pdf]

Final Report [pdf]

Additional Reports:
Zhu et al. 2014 [pdf]

Please contact Dr. Hampden Kuhns with questions regarding the final report.

Project Summary

This study integrates the results of previous and ongoing research to quantitatively examine how road dust emissions and atmospheric deposition are affected by several factors, including season, local wind conditions, vehicle class, vehicle speed, vehicle kilometers driven, road type, road maintenance practices, vegetative density, and proximity of the source road to Lake Tahoe.

Observations of these factors and patterns from several different studies have been combined and analyzed to create a Lake Tahoe Basin-wide emission factor database based on road type and jurisdiction. This database was then linked to a traffic demand model to create emission estimates for each of the 7000+ road segments around the basin.