Developing the Hull Acid Rain Model: its validation and implications for policy makers

Environmental Science & Policy

Hall

et al. 2009

The NERC and CEH trade marks and logos ('the Trademarks') are registered trademarks of NERC in the UK and other countries, and may not be used without the prior written consent of the Trademark owner. Wet deposition of nitrogen and sulphur was found to decrease more slowly than the emissions reductions rate.This is attributed to a number of factors including increases in emissions from international shipping and changing rates of atmospheric oxidation. The modelled time series was extended to a 50 year period from 1970 to 2020. The modelled deposition of SO x , NO y and NH x to the UK was found to fall by 87%, 52% and 25% during this period. The percentage of the United Kingdom surface area for which critical loads are exceeded is estimated to fall from 85% in 1970 to 37% in 2020 for acidic deposition and from 73% to 49% for nutrient nitrogen deposition. The significant reduction in land emissions of SO 2 and NO X focuses further attention in controlling emissions from international shipping. Future policies to control emissions of ammonia from agriculture will be required to effect further significant reductions in nitrogen deposition.

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The influence of long term trends in pollutant emissions on deposition of sulphur and nitrogen and exceedance of critical loads in the United Kingdom

Matejko

Environmental Science & Policy

Hall

et al. 2009

“…These models include the EMEP Eulerian model (Tarrasón et al, 2003) which operates at a 50 km resolution and is used to assess acid and nitrogen deposition on a European scale. UK Lagrangian models include FRAME (the Fine Resolution Atmospheric Multi-pollutants Exchange model; Singles et al, 1998), HARM (the Hull Acid Rain Model; Metcalfe et al, 2001) and TRACK (Lee et al, 2000) which operated on 5, 10 and 10 km grid resolutions, respectively. These models used spatial emissions inventories for SO 2 , NO X and NH 3 and were able to calculate deposition of sulphur (SO x ), oxidised nitrogen (NO y ) and reduced nitrogen (NH x ).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Modelling the atmospheric transport and deposition of sulphur and nitrogen over the United Kingdom and assessment of the influence of SO2 emissions from international shipping

Atmospheric Environment

Vieno

Tang

et al. 2007

114

A statistical Lagrangian atmospheric transport model was used to generate annual maps of deposition of sulphur and oxidised and reduced nitrogen for the United Kingdom at a 5 x 5 km 2 resolution. The model was run using emissions for the year 2002. The model was compared with measurements of gas concentrations (SO 2 , NO x , HNO 3 and NH 3 ) and of wet deposition and aerosol concentrations of SO 4 2-, NO 3 -and NH 4 + from national monitoring networks. Good correlation was obtained, demonstrating that the model is capable of accurately estimating the mass balance and spatial distribution of sulphur and nitrogen compounds in the atmosphere. A future emissions scenario for the year 2020 was used to test the influence of shipping emissions on sulphur deposition in the United Kingdom. The results show that, if shipping emissions are assumed to increase at a rate of 2.5% per year, their relative contribution to sulphur deposition is expected to increase from 9% to 28% between 2002 and 2020. The model was compared to both a European scale and a global scale chemical transport model and found to give broad agreement with the magnitude and location of sulphur deposition associated with shipping emissions. Enforcement of the MARPOL convention to reduce the sulphur content in marine fuel to 1% was estimated to result in a 6% reduction in total sulphur deposition to the UK for the year 2020. The percentage area of sensitive habitats with exceedance of critical loads for acidity in the UK was predicted to decrease by 1% with the implementation of the MARPOL convention.

“…In addition, the model is useful for source-receptor applications where large numbers of simulations are required. An example of such an application is the estimation of the contribution to nitrogen and sulphur deposition in the United Kingdom from each of the 75 counties and from 20 major point sources (Oxley et al 2003) Statistical Lagrangian atmospheric transport models such as FRAME (Singles et al 1998;Fournier et al 2002), HARM (Metcalfe et al 2001) and TRACK (Lee et al 2000) are used to provide gridded estimates of average annual deposition of sulphur, oxidized nitrogen and reduced nitrogen. They require use of a single wind frequency rose to drive the transport of trajectories of air across the model domain.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Development of a new wind‐rose for the British Isles using radiosonde data, and application to an atmospheric transport model

Quart J Royal Meteoro Soc

Vieno

Fournier

et al. 2006

SUMMARYA six-hourly dataset of radiosonde ascents spanning a ten-year period from four stations in the British Isles has been used to generate a set of wind frequency roses and wind speed roses for the pressure level range 950-900 hPa. The wind frequency rose showed close agreement with the long-term series of the Jenkinson classification scheme. Small but significant inter-station and interannual variations were observed. Seasonal analysis of the data revealed the higher incidence of north-easterlies during spring months whilst the stronger wind speeds associated with the winter months were also evident. The use of a harmonic mean was found to be appropriate for calculating a directionally dependent wind speed for use in an atmospheric transport model. A harmonic mean wind speed value of 7.5 m s −1 was generated from the entire dataset, the same as that which has previously been used in other transport models. This is also the same value as the 'optimized wind speed' that was generated by Singles et al. The radiosonde wind frequency rose and wind speed rose were input to the FRAME atmospheric transport model. This resulted in an improved correlation with measurements of SO 2 concentrations from a national monitoring network when compared to a model simulation using the earlier dataset of Jones.