Tuesday, 9 January 2018: 12:00 AM
Salon G (Hilton) (Austin, Texas)
Air quality in cities is strongly influenced by multiple scales emissions, such as point, linear and area sources. Factories, low-lying transport and domestic emissions are considered as the most important contributors to air pollution. Although sensors are the easiest and most direct way to measure pollutant concentrations, they are not always feasible and many cities have no monitoring networks. Hence, air dispersion models represent important support tools to investigate air pollution in urban environments and planning strategies to comply with environmental legislations. This paper analyses the urban air quality in Dublin, a European city of the “Improving the Smart Control of Air Pollution in European Cities” (iSCAPE) project, using the SIRANE dispersion model developed by the LMFA-AIR team of the École Centrale de Lyon (France). The geometry and street network of the city, the meteorological parameters, the background concentrations and the emission data are input referred to a specific year (2014). This paper presents a study of the model’s sensitivity, focusing on meteorological and emission data. SIRANE is validated by comparing the output to actual concentrations (e.g. Nitrogen Oxides) measured from different stations located in the city. In addition, the model is used to decompose each pollutant concentration in its scale-dependent components (e.g. background concentration, point sources, etc). This allows to emphasise the influence of specific point sources (i.e. factories, incinerators, etc.) on air quality in the investigated urban domain. The approach aims to point out the potentiality of air quality models as a helpful tool for both studying the actual impact of existing sources and planning strategies to reduce air pollution.
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