Urban Transportation and Air Pollution
By Akula Venkatram and Nico Schulte
()
About this ebook
Urban Transportation and Air Pollution synthesizes state-of-the-art methods on estimating near-road concentrations of roadway emissions. The book provides the information needed to make estimates using methods based on a minimal set of model inputs that can be applied by a wide range of users in many situations. Discussions include methods to estimate traffic emission under numerous urban driving conditions, the uncertainty of emission models, and the effects of road configurations, such as near-road solid barriers. Final sections present dispersion models that link traffic emissions with near road concentrations in urban environments.
Addressing transportation-related environmental issues is extremely important as urban areas are constantly searching for ways to mitigate impacts from transportation sources. This book helps to explain dispersion models, a critical tool for estimating the impact of roadway emissions in cities.
- Compiles and synthesizes the state-of-the-science methods for estimating roadway emissions
- Demonstrates, with clear examples, how modeling methods reduce uncertainties in real-world problems
- Emphasizes how local-scale, semi-empirical, steady-state modeling can be applied using only a small set of inputs
- Offers an overview of the meteorology that governs air pollution dispersion in cities
Akula Venkatram
Dr. Akula Venkatram is a Professor of Mechanical Engineering at the University of California, Riverside. He has over 40 years of experience in developing and applying air pollution models. Dr. Venkatram co-edited and contributed to the Lectures on Air Pollution Modeling published by the American Meteorological Society. He was member of the team that developed AERMOD, and was a principal contributor to RLINE, the USEPA model for line sources. He is the recipient of an award from AMS Committee on Meteorological Aspects of Air Pollution for “contributions to the field of air pollution meteorology through the development of simple models in acid deposition, ozone photochemistry and urban dispersion, 2011. His research on modeling the air quality impact of transport related emissions was recognized by the United States Environmental Protection Agency, through a Scientific and Technological Achievement Award for “expanding and improving the scientific and regulatory communities’ ability to assess the impacts of mobile source emissions, 2010.
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Urban Transportation and Air Pollution - Akula Venkatram
India
Preface
This book resulted out of a conversation I had with Brian Romer, the senior transportation editor from Elsevier, who contacted me in late 2015 after he had seen a paper I had co-authored. The paper dealt with the impact of vehicle emissions on near-road air quality. He convinced me that I could expand the topic to cover the broad field covering the relationship between vehicle emissions and urban air quality. I agreed with a little hesitation because several of my students had worked on this topic in their PhD research. Nico Schulte was finishing up his thesis on the impact of near-roadway structures, including noise barriers and urban buildings, on dispersion of vehicle emissions. I thought it was simply a matter of expanding his thesis with appropriate background. However including this background turned out to be much more difficult than I thought it would be. Nico Schulte and I have worked on this book for the last two years to include material that provides the rudimentary understanding of micrometeorology and dispersion required to follow the core of the subject. We felt that this was necessary because our experience indicates that a large fraction of people involved in air pollution modeling do not have the background to interpret the micrometeorological inputs required by currently used short-range dispersion models, such as AERMOD (Cimorelli et al., 2005). Furthermore, there is enough detail in the book to allow the reader to understand the formulation of these models. Thus the book can serve a student interested in the subject, as well as the practitioner who wants to examine the underlying machinery.
This book deals with one aspect of Urban Transportation and Air Pollution. Its primary focus is the development and application of dispersion models to estimate the impact of vehicle emissions on near-road air quality in the complex urban environment. It draws heavily on research that Nico and I have participated in with our collaborators. Thus the book has a relatively narrow focus on the type of models that we have developed and applied. The book is relatively brief because it is confined to models that we can vouch for through evaluation with observations from field studies and wind tunnel experiments.
We refer to the models described in this book as semi-empirical. These models combine a relatively simple mechanistic framework with an empirical approach to account for secondary processes not captured explicitly; they are not purely statistical relationships between concentrations and the governing variables. Their formulation is based on the hypothesis that the behavior of complex systems can be described by a small number of variables embedded in a framework based on conservation principles. These variables are then combined to yield equations that contain parameters whose values are obtained by fitting model estimates with corresponding measurements. An example of this approach is illustrated in the model for the impact of buildings on dispersion of vehicle emissions in urban areas (Schulte et al., 2015). The framework consists of a mass balance that equates emissions at street level to transport of these emissions in the vertical direction through turbulent diffusion. The associated eddy diffusivity is formulated in terms of the standard deviation of the vertical velocity fluctuations and a length scale that depends on building geometry, which in turn is described in terms of the effective height and the aspect ratio of the buildings lining the urban street of concern. The formulation for the length scale and the relating turbulence and building geometry contain parameters, whose values are obtained by fitting estimates of concentration from the overall model with corresponding measurements.
The applicability of these models outside the range of measurements used in the fitting procedure is determined by two criteria: (1) the validity of the mechanistic foundation, and (2) the variation of the model parameters, which should be as small as possible. The major strength of these models is that they are firmly anchored to observations. In formulating their framework, we use an approach that yields sensible values
over a wide range of inputs. We achieve this by interpolating between model formulations that can be supported by theory as well as observation. For example, the formulation for vertical plume spread (Venkatram and Schulte, 2014) for the entire range of unstable conditions interpolates between expressions for neutral and very unstable conditions. These expressions can be justified using theory, as well as observations from the Prairie Grass experiment (Barad, 1958). The interpolation is cast in terms of parameters that provide the best fit between model estimates and observations. A similar approach is used in constructing the complex terrain model in AERMOD (Venkatram et al., 2001), described in Appendix A.
This book does not discuss modeling based on computational fluid dynamics (CFD), which attempts to describe all the details of the governing processes through the numerical solution of the conservation equations. On the other hand, we do acknowledge the valuable insight provided by CFD models that help to formulate semi-empirical models.
There are very few practitioners of semi-empirical modeling, and most of them have collaborated with us in developing the models described in this book. Vlad Isakov, Richard Baldauf, Steven Perry, and David Heist from the United States Environmental Protection Agency (USEPA) worked with us in developing the models described in this book. This collaboration is one of the major reasons that components of our models are incorporated in practice-oriented models, such as AERMOD (Cimorelli et al., 2005) and R-LINE (Snyder et al., 2013), which are widely used to estimate concentrations associated with a variety of pollutant sources. The semi-empirical models are also components of modeling systems to estimate the impact of emissions from urban highways (Barzyk et al., 2015) and seaports (Isakov et al., 2017). Other significant collaborators are Marko Princevac, David Pankratz, Dennis Fitz, Alan Cimorelli, Robert Paine, Sarav Arunachalam, Parikshit Deshmukh, Michelle Snyder, Jeffrey Weil, and Steven Hanna.
My students have played a major role in developing the semi-empirical models described here. Shuming Du, Qiguo Jing, Jing Yuan, Si Tan, and Wenjun Qian helped me with my early research in dispersion modeling. I am deeply grateful to Sam Pournazeri who contributed to several chapters as well as the Appendix of the book. He is also responsible for the colorful illustrations in these sections. The major contributors to the core of the book are Seyedmorteza Amini and Faraz Enayati Ahangar, my students. Nico Schulte, the coauthor of this book, collaborated with me in my research and also helped me bring past research together to create a coherent book.
The research that resulted in the models described in this book has been supported by the California Air Resources Board, the South Coast Air Quality Management District, the California Energy Commission, the National Science Foundation and the USEPA.
References
1. Barad ML. Project Prairie Grass: a field program in diffusion vol II. Geophys Res Pap. 1958; https://doi.org/10.1016/0022-460X(71)90105-2.
2. Barzyk TM, Isakov V, Arunachalam S, Venkatram A, Cook R, Naess B. A near-road modeling system for community-scale assessments of traffic-related air pollution in the United States. Environ Model Softw. 2015;66:46–56 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.envsoft.2014.12.004.
3. Cimorelli AJ, Perry SG, Venkatram A, et al. AERMOD: A dispersion model for industrial source applications Part I: General model formulation and boundary layer characterization. J Appl Meteorol. 2005;44:682–693 https://doi.org/10.1175/JAM2227.1.
4. Isakov V, Barzyk TM, Smith ER, Arunachalam S, Naess B, Venkatram A. A web-based screening tool for near-port air quality assessments. Environ Model Softw 2017;98 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.envsoft.2017.09.004.
5. Schulte N, Tan S, Venkatram A. The ratio of effective building height to street width governs dispersion of local vehicle emissions. Atmos Environ. 2015;112:54–63 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.atmosenv.2015.03.061.
6. Snyder MG, Venkatram A, Heist DK, Perry SG, Petersen WB, Isakov V. RLINE: A line source dispersion model for near-surface releases. Atmos Environ. 2013;77:748–756 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.atmosenv.2013.05.074.
7. Venkatram A, Brode R, Cimorelli A, et al. A complex terrain dispersion model for regulatory applications. Atmos Environ. 2001;35 https://doi.org/10.1016/S1352-2310(01)00186-8.
8. Venkatram A, Schulte N. On formulating equations for plume spreads for near-surface releases. Int J Environ Pollut. 2014;54 https://doi.org/10.1504/IJEP.2014.065116.
Chapter One
Introduction
Abstract
This book summarizes some of the research conducted during the last 15 years on estimating the impact of vehicle-related emissions on near-road air quality. This book focuses on plume-based transport and dispersion models applicable to source–receptor distances of a few kilometers. The models described in this book are applicable to urban areas. Chapter 2 discusses terminology and concepts used to characterize air pollutants and meteorological processes. Chapter 3 presents fundamental concepts of micrometeorology and dispersion in the surface layer. Chapter 4 presents models that predict concentrations next to roads in urban areas. These models account for the presence of solid and vegetative barriers next to the roads and for depression of the roadway. Chapter 5 discusses the effect of buildings next to the road on concentrations of traffic emissions. Chapter 6 summarizes the models presented in this book and provides a description of methods used to estimate micrometeorological inputs required for the models.
Keywords
Turbulence; traffic-related air pollution; dispersion model; urban roadway
Contents
Scope of the Book 1
Models Treated in this Book 2
Modeling Emissions for Transport Applications 4
Organization of this Book 8
References 10
Scope of the Book
This book summarizes some of the research conducted during the last 15 years on estimating the impact of vehicle-related emissions on near road air quality. Although the impact of roadway emissions on air quality has been studied since the 1970s, it has become prominent more recently in the light of a number of epidemiological studies reporting associations between living within a few hundred meters of high-traffic roadways and adverse health effects such as asthma and other respiratory impacts, birth and developmental effects, premature mortality, cardiovascular effects, and cancer (e.g., Harrison et al., 1999; Brauer et al., 2002; Hoek et al., 2002; Finkelstein et al., 2004).
Air quality monitoring studies conducted near major roadways indicate that these health effects are associated with elevated concentrations, compared with overall urban background levels, of motor-vehicle-emitted compounds, which include carbon monoxide (CO); nitrogen oxides (NOx); coarse (PM10–2.5), fine (PM2.5), and ultrafine (PM0.1) particle mass; particle number; black carbon, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, and benzene (Kim et al., 2002; Hutchins et al., 2000; Kittelson et al., 2004).
This book describes models that describe the transport and dispersion of pollutants emitted from vehicles traveling on urban roads. It does not deal with the chemistry of pollutant formation or the factors that determine the emissions rate from vehicles. This is a subject with an extensive literature that can be readily consulted by the reader. We confine ourselves to the modeling of the processes that connect emissions to the corresponding concentrations at a receptor. We first review the types of models that are generally used to estimate concentrations as a backdrop to the models that we discuss in this book.
Models Treated in this Book
An air quality model is a mathematical description of the system that governs the fate of air pollutants emitted into the atmosphere. The air quality system consists of a large number of processes, which include transport by the mean wind, dispersion through turbulence, scavenging through dry and wet deposition, and chemistry involving the chemical species in the atmosphere. The relative importance of these processes depends on the source-receptor distance of concern. For example, at distances of a few tens of kilometers from a source, transport and dispersion are the dominant processes although this is not always true.
It is convenient to use different approaches to modeling air pollution depending on source-receptor distances. For distances of tens of kilometers from the source, a continuously emitted pollutant is treated as a plume governed by meteorology in the vicinity of the source. For larger distances, when meteorological variables show significant spatial and temporal variations, it is more convenient to model the fate of emissions using puff models or Eulerian grid models. In puff models, an emission over a short period of time is embedded in a puff or air parcel, which is then tracked as it follows the varying wind field. The puff grows in response to turbulent dispersion, and the chemical species inside the puff undergo scavenging and chemical reactions. Puff models require a great deal of bookkeeping because one needs to keep track of the large number of puffs that correspond to each hour of emission. Some of this bookkeeping can be avoided through receptor-oriented puff models. In this approach, the concentration of the species at a receptor is governed only by the puff that arrives at the time and location of interest. The final state of this puff is determined by calculating the history of puff before it arrives at the receptor. This involves tracing the path of the puff as it passes over emissions and is subject to scavenging and chemical