A Tool to Evaluate the Air Quality Impact for Industrial Plants: an Application over the Madrid Area

The air quality impact of the industrial emissions is one of the most important areas of research in the last years not only because of the progressive public interest on environmental issues but also from the industrial approach. The interest of knowing the exact and detailed portion of different air concentrations in the area where an industrial plant is located in realtime and in forecasting mode opens a considerable number of possibilities which are useful for the public, environmental authorities and industrial managers. In this contribution we will show the performance of a mathematical / software tool which is used to forecast the air quality impact of an industrial source (virtual source in this example) over the Madrid domain. We have developed an expert system which is used as a visual and managing interface for presenting the information to the industrial manager almost on realtime and based on the results of the simulation of the mathematical model. Two different environmental modelling systems have been used: the OPANA model as representative of the second generation of air quality models and the MM5 (PSU/NCAR) mesoscale meteorological model and the CMAQ (EPA, Community Multiscale Air Quality Modelling System) as representative of the third generation and state-of-the-art of the environmental air quality models. We have used an industrial plant located at the north part of the Madrid city. This industrial plant emits SO2, NOx and VOC’s. We have investigated the effect on NO2, NO, SO2, CO and O3 air concentrations over the whole area for the test period of February 4-8, 2002 as a preliminary analysis. Results show important differences on air concentrations, particularly for those cells located in the predominant wind direction during the simulation period and also for ozone and reactive primary pollutants. The process and analysis suggests that the visualization and analysis capabilities of the post-process study are essential for an improving of the industrial management decision processes. The complexity of the post-process expert system is important since the number of variables and the size of the output files are on the order of several Gbytes.