Simple atmospheric dispersion model to estimate hourly ground-level nitrogen dioxide and ozone concentrations at urban scale

摘要

Atmospheric nitrogen dioxide (NO2) and ozone (O-3) present potential health risk at large urban centres worldwide. Modelling their ground-level concentrations is a fundamental part of urban air quality assessment studies. Simple atmospheric dispersion models are particularly useful in places lacking detailed input data to run complex models and for applications requiring a large number of simulations, also allowing high spatial and temporal resolution even for long-term calculations. The DAUMOD-GRS urban atmospheric dispersion model has been developed aiming to have these features. This work presents its performance evaluation considering hourly concentrations of NO2 and O-3 measured at twenty sites across the Metropolitan Area of Buenos Aires (MABA), Argentina. Results show an acceptable model performance, with a small tendency to underestimate NO2 and to overestimate O-3. By grouping the monitoring sites in regions having different emission conditions, it is found that the model reproduces well the observed urban-suburban concentration gradients. (C) 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.