An integrated modelling approach to estimate urban traffic emissions

Abstract

Vehicular emissions contribute significantly to poor air quality in urban areas. An integrated modelling approach is adopted to estimate microscale urban traffic emissions. The modelling framework consists of a traffic microsimulation model, a microscopic emissions model, and two dispersion models. This framework is applied to a traffic network in downtown Toronto to evaluate summer time morning peak traffic emissions during weekdays for carbon monoxide and nitrogen oxide. The model predicted results are validated against sensor observations with a reasonably good fit. Availability of local estimates of ambient concentration is useful for accurate comparisons of total predicted concentrations with observed concentrations. Both predicted and observed concentrations are significantly smaller than the National Ambient Air Quality Objectives established by Environment Canada. Sensitivity analysis is performed on a set of input parameters and horizontal wind speed is found to be the most influential factor in pollutant dispersion.iii

Atmospheric dispersion modeling near a roadway under calm meteorological conditions

“…However, the temporal correlations between observed and modeled concentrations are typically poor for many models. For example Misra et al (2013) obtained a correlation of hourly nitrogen oxides (NO x ) simulated concentrations with the Gaussian model AERMOD of 0.35. Hirtl and Baumann-Stanzer (2007) simulated NO x concentration with the Gaussian model ADMS-Roads.…”

Modelamiento de la calidad del aire en la ciudad de Cuenca-Ecuador

“…Los modelos gaussianos son de uso común para el estudio de fuentes puntuales como las chimeneas industriales, mientras que los de escala local y regional son herramientas de gestión de calidad del aire ya que consideran los efectos de múltiples fuentes, contaminantes primarios y secundarios, procesos de deposición y meteorología local y regional. Los modelos globales al igual que los locales y regionales abarcan múltiples variables y, además, resuelven las ecuaciones de continuidad para toda la atmósfera [3].…”

Assessing the energy impact of traffic management and vehicle hybridisation

“…PTV VISSIM lists ENviVer (based on VERSIT+) as a plug-in for emission and energy modelling (PTV Group, n.d.), but there are also examples of ad-hoc linkages with MOVES (Abou-Senna and Radwan, 2013), PHEM (Hirschmann et al, 2010) and CMEM (Stevanovic et al, 2009). Quadstone Paramics, another commercial microsimulation tool has been used in conjunction with VERSIT+ (Madireddy et al, 2011), MOVES (Xie et al, 2012) and CMEM (Boriboonsomsin and Barth, 2008;Misra et al, 2013). CMEM was also used in a study of Lee et al (2009), while the energy model VT-micro was used with TRANSIMS (Kwak et al, 2012).…”