Effect of digital elevation model in air pollution modeling using AERMOD

Subject Areas : Geospatial systems development

Zahra Khebri ¹ , Narjes-Sadat Mousavian Nadoushan ² , Farhad Nezhadkurki ³ , Nabiollah Mansouri ⁴

1 - MSc. Student of Environment, College of Natural Resources & Desert Studies, Yazd University
2 - PhD. Student of Environment, College of Environment and Energy, Islamic Azad University, Science and Research Branch
3 - Assoc. Prof. College of Natural Resources & Desert Studies, Yazd University
4 - Assoc. Prof. College of Environment and Energy, Islamic Azad University, Science and Research Branch, Tehran

Received: 2012-11-25 Accepted : 2013-05-22 Published : 2014-01-21

Keywords:

Abstract :

Accordance with the importance of air pollutants and their effects on human health, assessment of air pollutant emission model's accuracy is significant. One of the models that widely used is AERMOD which is a permanent prediction model. The purpose of this research was evaluated the accuracy of AERMOD model, with and without application of topography. To achieve this goal, model ran with 24 hour meteorological data from Yazd synoptic station as input data and EAF stack monitoring data of I.A.S.Co. as the on-site data. Also, Global maper software version 13 was used for creating model's requirements for DEM format with different resolutions of 30, 50 and 90 meters. After that, model ran on both situations, flat and non-flat area (with applying topography), and then results compared together. The results indicated that the average concentration of pollutant in condition using topography is 0.036 µg/m3 higher than condition without usage topography. Also, the results showed the maximum concentration of pollutant in the case without using AERMAP, is 1 µg/m3 in opposite direction to the prevailing wind, in stack western direction and with using AERMAP, the maximum concentration is equal to 17.5 in prevailing wind direction in stack eastern and south eastern direction. Furthermore, by usage DEM with different resolutions, little difference was found in the mean concentrations predicted by the model. The result is that without implementation of AERMAP, the prediction was not sufficiently accurate. Furthermore, AERMAP could also be run with DEM 90 m and finally model could run.

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