Initial Validation Regarding the Use of AERMOD to Model Air Pollutant Dispersion in Medium-Sized Latin American City Streets

GRASSI, YAMILA S.; DÍAZ, MÓNICA F.

Lecture Notes in Networks and Systems. Trends in Sustainable Smart Cities and Territories. SSCT 2023

Springer

Lugar: Cham; Año: 2023; p. 266 - 276

Air pollution sources have changed over time, but they remain a major global concern. Mobile sources, mainly on-road, are considered one of the main anthropogenic sources of several polluting gasses, particulate matter and greenhouse gasses. In this regard, population and motorized traffic growth in cities make it necessary to have tools for measuring or estimating air quality. In this sense, emission dispersion models help to estimate the pollutant concentrations in the emission sources’ surroundings, especially in cities that do not have air quality monitoring. This is the case of the Bahía Blanca (Argentina), a medium-sized Latin American city, which has high vehicular traffic in the downtown area during peak hours. Consequently, in previous works, the AERMOD model was used to estimate air quality in some downtown streets, and these results must be validated. In this work we show an initial validation proposal for the modeling methodology. Therefore, we took advantage of an air quality monitoring station recently located in an area compatible with the city center. Although the station is located on the city´s outskirts, it is an area influenced by vehicle traffic emissions, as is the city´s microcenter. The results of the present work follow the station data trend, confirming that the modeling may be able to show changes in air quality. This work is a preliminary study, and tries to find a simple and easy solution to be applied in places of interest in cities where urban air pollution levels are to be estimated in a reliable way.