Emissions and air concentrations of pollutant for urban area sources

PULIAFITO, ENRIQUE

Buenos Aires

Congreso; XV Congreso sobre métodos numéricos y sus aplicaciones, MECOM 20005; 2005

Asociación Argentina de Mecánica Computacional

Abstract. Urban air pollution estimation as well as greenhouse emissions rely on the preparation of good source inventories. Depending on the desired temporal and geographical scale of such inventories, two complementary calculations are generally proposed to estimate these emissions: the top-down and the bottom-up approach. This paper is divided in two sections, in the first part, a brief report of both methods are presented, applied to the mobile urban sources, which is then used to prepare a gridded emission pattern. In the second part, an urban area source dispersion algorithm is presented to compute the ambient concentration using the calculated gridded emission pattern for any particular meteorological conditions. The proposed method calculates the ambient concentration of the entire area, by convolving the response of one unit cell with the gridded emission pattern of the area under study. This method is computationally more efficient than applying the standard regulatory algorithms for any area shape. The results are then applied on a geographical information system. Key words: urban air quality, atmospheric dispersion, greenhouse emissions, area sources, geographical information system.