“Air Benefit and Cost and Attainment Assessment System” (ABaCAS) is an integrated assessment system that connects air pollution emissions control and costs with air quality benefits, health and economic impacts, and air quality attainment tests. Developed jointly by an international team of scientists and U.S. EPA, ABaCAS is designed to provide researchers and policy makers with a user-friendly framework to link a set of decision support tools for conducting integrated assessments of air quality. The ABaCAS tools include:
1) ABaCAS Streamlined Edition (ABaCAS-SE) is an integrated and streamlined benefit, cost and attainment assessment system designed particularly for efficient air quality policy analyses.
2) ABaCAS Optimized Edition (ABaCAS-OE) is an integrated and Optimized benefit, cost and attainment assessment system designed particularly for developing optimized (least cost) control strategies.
3) International Control Cost Estimate Tool (ICET) is an emissions control and cost estimate tool that associates control costs with emissions reductions and air quality benefit assessment.
4) Response Surface Model – Visualization Analysis Tool (RSM-VAT) is an air quality assessment tool that provides real-time estimate of air quality responses to emissions changes using air quality models such as CMAQ and CAMx.
5) Software of Model Attainment Test – Community Edition (SMAT-CE) is a model attainment assessment tool for PM2.5, O3 and visibility. A customized version “SMAT-Asia” has also been developed particularly for international applications.
6) Environmental Benefits Mapping and Analysis Program – Community Edition (BenMAP-CE) is a health and economic benefit assessment tool that estimates health and economic impacts from changes in air quality.
7) Model-Visualization Analysis Tool (Model-VAT) is a flexible and modular visualization software tool that allows users to visualize multivariate gridded environmental datasets created by environmental modeling systems.
8) Data Fusion Tool (DFT) is a user-friendly tool to provide the spatial field interpolation for fusing scattered monitoring data and gridded model data spatially together.
9) FAST-CE is a flexible framework for integrating more complex air quality surfaces generated by photochemical models applied with instrumented techniques including source apportionment (e.g., PSAT/OSAT in CAMx, ISAM in CMAQ), Decoupled Direct Method (DDM), and RSM.
10) Nexus is an advanced air quality planning tool for multi-pollutant (MP) (PM2.5, O3 & air toxics) risks, Environmental Justice (EJ)/Demographic & Climate risk analyses. It provides a ‘conceptual model’ of an area’s MP issues to determine whether a multi-pollutant approach would be beneficial for the area of interest.