Monitoring and modeling air quality in Mendoza, Argentina

PULIAFITO, SALVADOR ENRIQUE; PULIAFITO, CARLOS MARIO

Local and Regional Aspects of Air Quality Management

WIT PRESS

Lugar: Southampton; Año: 2004; p. 83 - 118

Like many big urban centers, Mendoza, a city of about 900,000 inhabitants, has been increasing its air pollution mostly from mobile sources. To asses on its air quality, two main strategies has been developed: the setup of a network of monitoring stations and the development of a comprehensive model. Continuous monitoring and daily measurements of main pollutants had been performed since more than 10 years, at different sites, combined with several measuring campaigns. On the other side, a model, based on a geographical information system has been developed to evaluate the air quality derived from stationary and mobile sources. Once the model has been calibrated with the given measurements, the system is then used to test the compliance to local standard air quality, or to study the environmental impact of new industries or to determine the changing conditions when vehicle circulation is increased. This allows to characterize areas with potential increase in air pollution or improvement in air quality. It is also possible to compute past or present conditions by changing basic information as traffic flow, or stack emission rates. In this article a review of the monitoring and modeling efforts, together with a prognosis of future possible scenarios will be presented. Also a case study during a high pollution event occurred in May 1995 is here described.