Modelling urban background nitrogen dioxide concentrations In the city of Buenos Aires, Argentina.

PINEDA ROJAS, ANDREA L.; BORGE, RAFAEL

Barranquilla

Congreso; VII Congreso Colombiano y Conferencia Internacional de Calidad del Aire y Salud Pública (CASAP 7); 2019

The ability of the DAUMOD-GRS model to estimate ground-level urban background nitrogen dioxide (NO2) concentrations in the city of Buenos Aires is assessed. Metrics show an acceptable model performance at the three air quality monitoring stations available and are better at the urban background site, as expected. When analysing their values by ranges of meteorological variables, some overestimation under low wind speed and moderately stable atmospheric conditions is found. This can be overcome by removing the memory effect from the model and represents an important improvement given that NO2 usually peaks occur under those conditions. Results confirm that this change improves model performance under most conditions. Other potential improvements through better parameter representations such as including hourly-resolved initial ozone concentration require further research.