Heavy Metal Modelling Study over Italy: Effects of Grid Resolution, Lateral Boundary Conditions and Foreign Emissions on Air Concentrations

Abstract

Heavy metals (HMs) are pollutants that have both anthropogenic and natural sources. In the last decade, the European Commission (EC) has imposed limit and target values for some of them that are toxic both for humans and for the environment. This study aims to assess the HM concentrations over Italy by means of the atmospheric modelling system (AMS) of the MINNI project. The AMS is based on the chemical transport model (CTM) FARM. The sensitivity of model simulations to horizontal grid resolution, lateral boundary conditions and the contribution of emissions from neighbouring countries has been also evaluated. The simulations have been carried out for the year 2005 considering a spatial resolution of 20 km over the Italian domain and 4 km over northern Italy (Po Valley). The CTM has been extended to take into account the HMs considered by EC directives such as arsenic (As), cadmium (Cd), nickel (Ni) and lead (Pb). Both anthropogenic and natural emissions have been considered in this study. Model results have been compared with available observations. Results show realistic concentration of HMs and suggest the importance of using boundary conditions, while foreign emissions have less impact. In addition, the present work highlights the necessity of more observations in space and time for a comprehensive validation of the model. High-resolution simulation gives more realistic pattern with respect to the lowresolution one for the highly polluted areas. However, future improvements require a better knowledge of the space/time distribution of the emissions, currently not available.

Fine Particulate Matter in Urban Environments: A Trigger of Respiratory Symptoms in Sensitive Children

“…Figure 2 shows the result that corresponds to the typical seasonal fluctuation of the PM 2.5 time series reported in other studies, e.g., [14,27,28]. In this context, the exposure levels are highest in the cold months compared to the warmer ones [51].…”

“…Assessing long-term exposure to particulate air pollution and their associated health effects in children is difficult, mainly because of the complex setup required for the personal monitoring of particulate matter and the complex mobility patterns [26,27,28]. New methods for quantifying children’s exposure to various harmful fractions of PM [1,14,29] are explored, as is an assessment of the effects that particle size and associated chemical speciation on health [30,31].…”

Estimation of PM10-bound manganese concentration near a ferromanganese alloy plant by atmospheric dispersion modelling

“…The concentrations of several heavy metals have been modelled using different air quality models such as the Hybrid Single Particle Lagrangian Integrated Trajectory Model (HYSPLIT) for Cu, As, Zn, Co, Ni, Cr (Chen et al, 2012(Chen et al, , 2013(Chen et al, , 2016a; Fine Resolution Atmospheric Multi-pollutant Exchange (FRAME) for As, Cr, Cd, Cu, Ni, Pb, Se, V, Zn (Dore et al, 2014); CHIMERE Model for Pb, Cd, Ni, As, Cr, Se (González et al, 2012); The Flexible Air Quality Regional Model (FARM) for Pb, Ni, Cd, As (Adani et al, 2015); Community Multi-scale Air Quality (CMAQ) for Hg (Zhu et al, 2015); CALPUFF Modeling System (CALPUFF) for Cd, Pb, Zn (MacIntosh et al, 2010); AERMOD/CALPUFF Modeling Systems (AERMOD/CALPUFF) for Cr (Burger, 2004). However, few air manganese modelling studies have been done.…”

Evaluation of air quality forecasting system FORAIR_IT over Europe and Italy at high resolution for year 2017

“…The components of the modelling system are the same as in AMS-MINNI (Atmospheric Modelling System -Italian National Integrated Model to support the international negotiation on atmospheric pollution), whose performances have been evaluated in several studies over Italy (Mircea et al, 2014(Mircea et al, , 2016Ciancarella et al, 2016;Vitali et al, 2019) and in the intercomparison exercise EURODELTA-III over Europe (Bessagnet et al, 2014(Bessagnet et al, , 2016). The modelling system is based on the chemical transport model FARM -Flexible Air quality Regional Model - (Silibello et al, 2008(Silibello et al, , 2012Gariazzo et al, 2007;Kukkonen et al, 2012;Adani et al, 2015), the meteorological driver RAMS -Regional Atmospheric Modelling System - (Cotton et al, 2003), the pre-processor SURFPro -SURFace-atmosphere interface PROcessor - (Arianet, 2011) and the emission processor EMMA -EMission MAnager - (Arianet, 2014).…”