Modelling and predicting urban atmospheric pollutants in the Aosta Valley region of Italy using a site‐optimised model

Abstract

An effective simple site-optimised urban air pollution model for predicting CO, PM 10 , NO and NO 2 concentrations is developed for the topographically complex region of the Aosta Valley in Italy. The good results suggest that such a model could be used to 'downscale' mesoscale-forecasted surface conditions to give real-time site-specific pollution predictions.

A Simple Tool to Identify Representative Wind Sites for Air Pollution Modelling Applications

“…The air pollution model chosen for this study is a simple Site-Optimized Semiempirical model (SOSE) [9,10]. This model was developed and tested in New Zealand [9,10] and shown to be effective in predicting ambient concentrations of a range of pollutants associated with road traffic [20]. It has been found to be useful in practical applications such as interpolating for missing data and looking at "what if" scenarios associated with changes in traffic patterns and surface meteorology [9,10,20,21].…”

“…This model was developed and tested in New Zealand [9,10] and shown to be effective in predicting ambient concentrations of a range of pollutants associated with road traffic [20]. It has been found to be useful in practical applications such as interpolating for missing data and looking at "what if" scenarios associated with changes in traffic patterns and surface meteorology [9,10,20,21]. It has also been shown to be effective in conditions of complex terrain, as found in the Aosta Valley of Italy [20].…”

“…It has been found to be useful in practical applications such as interpolating for missing data and looking at "what if" scenarios associated with changes in traffic patterns and surface meteorology [9,10,20,21]. It has also been shown to be effective in conditions of complex terrain, as found in the Aosta Valley of Italy [20]. An advantage of this model is that it can be trained exclusively using a set of wind and concentration data and it can be expected to perform well if the wind data used as input are representative of the area in terms of its dispersion characteristics.…”

The evolving concept of air pollution: a small‐world network or scale‐free network?

“…In these studies, the application of several models to Lanzhou (e.g. the site‐optimized model (Dirks et al , )) is limited because of the topography of the valley. The analysis of causes and formation mechanism of atmospheric pollution has not been fully developed.…”