Modeling Population Exposures To Pollutants Emitted From Natural Gas Cooking Burners

We developed a physics-based data-supported model to investigate indoor pollutant exposure distributions resulting from use of natural gas cooking appliances across households in California. The model was applied to calculate time-resolved indoor concentrations of CO, NO2 and formaldehyde resulting from cooking burners and entry with outdoor air. Exposure metrics include 1-week average concentrations and frequency of exceeding ambient air quality standards. We present model results for Southern California (SoCal) using two air-exchange scenarios in winter: (1) infiltration-only, and (2) air exchange rate (AER) sampled from lognormal distributions derived from measurements. In roughly 40percent of homes in the SoCal cohort (N=6634) the 1-hour USEPA NO2 standard (190?g/m3) was exceeded at least once. The frequency of exceeding this standard was largely independent of AER assumption, and related primarily to building volume, emission rate and amount of burner use. As expected, AER had a more substantial impact on one-week average concentrations.