This is a competitive contract solicitation to support the California Air Resources Board (CARB or Board) research priorities for fiscal year 2021-2022. CARB staff will hold a Pre-Application Workshop on April 8, 2021 for this and related projects. CARB is encouraging proposers to form multidisciplinary teams to fulfill contract requirements. Principle Investigators (PIs) must be affiliated with University of California and California State Universities, however, CARB encourages PIs to recruit non-academic research partners and diversify research efforts and talent.
Time activity patterns (TAPs) are important for estimating exposure to outdoor and indoor air pollutants emitted from a wide range of sources such as vehicle exhaust, cooking, cleaning solvents, and sources near other activities in Californians’ everyday life. However, TAPs used by health and exposure efforts are outdated, typically lack key components including priority communities, social economic status (SES), or environmental justice (EJ), and are often too general, resulting in a bias or misclassification in the estimation of exposure in the population being studied. There is an urgent need to develop an up-to-date and more comprehensive set of TAP data for researchers to refine exposure assessment in health and exposure studies. The objective of this project is to create 1) a white paper that summarizes a one-stop-shop for time activity methods, models, and uses, including how these techniques can help regulations, improve exposure estimates by including the activity pattern data in health and exposure studies and 2) a framework for a follow-on study to update TAP data to modern life activities throughout the diverse regions and socio economic strata in California using a combination of modern data information including big data, low cost sensors, modeling, and traditional personal monitoring with a multi-regional and multi-community emphasis. The results of the two-fold effort will first yield a compendium of knowledge about how activities effect exposure to sources, both indoor and outdoor, that determine the real exposure to air pollution among Californians. This information will be used to refine exposure estimate benefits from regulations and avoid exposure misclassification in published results from population studies. Secondly this work will create a framework for a follow-on effort to develop an updated modern, multi-racial, multi-regional activity pattern data set which will improve the efficacy of future regulations, health, and exposure studies.
Sign Up 
