Is it rubbish in, rubbish out for dispersion models?

The concentration and dispersion of pollutants within a city have important impacts on the health of the inhabitants. Accurate forecasts of peak concentrations could help city planners to take mitigation action to prevent serious incidents and improve the urban environment. However, forecasts of concentrations require not only a good pollution and dispersion model, but also good quality forecast data used as forcing for these models.

This this paper, we will look at the impact of using data from the Met Office models over an urban area to force the Met Office pollution and dispersion model (NAME). The forcing model data will be created using a standard configuration without explicit representation of urban areas to give control conditions for the NAME model output. These results will be compared to model simulations derived with forcing data that explicitly includes a simple representation of urban the areas.

Since the Met Office models have varying resolution, then in addition to the explicit representation of urban areas, we will investigate the impact of resolution for forcing data on the NAME model. The aim will be to determine the resolution at which good forcing data can be obtained. The results will be compared to observed concentrations to determine the impact of the quality of the forcing data on the final product.