The United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) prepares a national criteria and hazardous air pollutant (HAP) emission inventory with input from numerous states, local and tribal air agencies. These data are used for air dispersion modeling, regional control strategy development, air toxics risk assessment and tracking trends in emissions over time. The national emission inventory preparation, analysis and review is supported by two databases - the criteria National Emission Inventory (NEI) database and the HAP National Toxics Inventory (NTI) database. State and local agencies provide their point and non-point source category emissions inventory data to the NEI through the EPA's Central Data Exchange (CDX) facility. At present, there is one acceptable and existing data transfer format for submitting data to the NEI - the NEI Input Format (NIF). However, the NIF data transmittal format can be provided in three separate file types: ASCII flat files, Microsoft Access or eXt...
Charles E. Campbell, Andrew Eisenberg, Jim Melton