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Urban air pollution poses a significant threat to human health, the environment and the quality of life of people throughout the world. In the United Kingdom 103 areas have been declared as local air quality management areas (LAQMA). While in India, 72 cities have been identified as cities having poor air quality/non-attainment area, i.e., the air quality in these cities are exceeding prescribed National Ambient Air Quality Standards (NAAQS). The transport sector is the principal source of local air pollution in urban areas, because of the increased vehicular population, vehicle kilometres travelled (VKT) and lack of infrastructure development.Many mathematical models have been widely used as tools in local air quality management in developed countries. Among them, ADMS [1] and AERMOD [2] models have been widely used for urban air quality management in Europe and the US, respectively. However, their applications are limited in developing countries like India due to the lack of readily available input data, time and the cost involved in collecting the required model input data. In this paper the performance evaluation of ADMS and AERMOD in predicting particulate matter (PM) concentrations at road sides in Chennai, India and Newcastle, UK is discussed. The statistical parameters such as Index of Agreement (IA), Fractional Bias (FB), Normalized Mean Square Error (NMSE), Geometric Mean Bias (MG) and Geometric Mean Variance (VG) have been used to evaluate the ADMS and AERMOD model performance. Results indicated that both the models are able to predict the pollutant concentrations with reasonable accuracy. The IA values for ADMS and AERMOD are found to be 0.39 and 0.37 and 0.48 and 0.44, respectively, for the Chennai and Newcastle study sites.

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Recent economic development in many Asian and European countries has shown an increase in vehicle kilometre travel (VKT) in many cities, which has resulted in an increase in the vehicular pollution levels. In particular, particulate matter (PM) concentrations emitted from vehicles are at alarming levels in most of the cities of the world. Therefore, there is growing interest in the formulation of local level air quality management system to tackle vehicular emissions. Many mathematical models have been widely used as tools in urban air quality management. In the present paper, an attempt has been made to evaluate the performance of the ADMS Urban model in predicting roadside PM concentrations at two cities namely Chennai, India and Newcastle, UK during critical winter period of the year 2009. The statistical parameters such as Index of Agreement (IA), Fractional Bias (FB), Normalized Mean Square Error (NMSE), Geometric Mean Bias (MG) and Geometric Mean Variance (VG) have been used to evaluate the ADMS model performance. Results indicated that the roadside PM concentrations predicted by the ADMS model are reasonably accurate for Newcastle than at the roadside in Chennai.