BACKGROUND The chemical composition of aerosols and particle size distributions are the most significant factors affecting air quality. In particular, the exposure to finer particles can cause short and long-term effects on human health. In the present paper PM10 (particulate matter with aerodynamic diameter lower than 10 μm), CO, NOx (NO and NO2), Benzene and Toluene trends monitored in six mo...

In this work, we investigate the possibility of using inspiration from the self-organizing property of organisms in nature for providing visual representation of an invisible pollutant profile. We present a novel mathematical model of the bacterium and use it to find pollutants in the environment. This model has the capability of exploring the environment to search for sparsely distributed poll...

The most common velocity measurement techniques, based on image analysis, calculate the velocity by cross-correlation of a portion of the digitized images, and give a Eulerian description of the investigated field. Particle tracking velocimetry (PTV), based on the recognition of trajectories of seeding particles, only furnishes a Eulerian description provided the trajectories are shorter than t...

Stormwater management for water quality control is a relatively recent technology. Initially urban stormwater was considered a water quantity problem solved by rapidly draining runoff into sewers, ditches or directly into lakes and rivers. By the mid-1970s studies showed over half the pollutant loads entering Florida waters came from non-point sources (stormwater) caused in part by paving, ditc...

A detailed understanding of the study area is essential to achieve key information and optimize the monitoring, analysis, and evaluation of water quality of natural ecosystems that have been highly transformed into agricultural areas. Using classification techniques like the hierarchical cluster analysis (CA) and partial triadic analysis (PTA), we assessed the sources of water pollution and the...

Liquids coming from different sources like wastewaters, agricultural and industrial activities and leakages of chemical substances often have high concentration of chemical compositions and the osmotic gradient generated around such sources causes a considerable transmission of the Contamination. The steam transmitted by non-polluted soils moves to polluted masses, causing an increase in the vo...

In 003 the US Environmental Protection Agency (USEPA) created a Water Quality Trading Policy consistent with the Clean Water Act of 97 . Building on the successes of the National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System (NPDES) permit program to address point-source discharges and the Total Maximum Daily Load (TMDL) program, which established watershed pollution loads, water-quality trading was c...

While more attention has been paid in recent years to urban point source pollution control through the establishment of wastewater treatment plants in many developing countries, no considerable planning nor any serious measures have been taken to control urban non-point source pollution (urban stormwater runoff). The present study is a screening analysis to investigate the pollution loads in ur...

The presence of an emerging brominated flame retardant, decabromodiphenylethane (DBDPE), has been confirmed in Spanish sewage sludge. Thirty one samples from different urban wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs) were analyzed for this brominated flame retardant. DBDPE was positively identified and quantified in all samples at lower concentrations (47.0 +/- 29.7 ng/g dry weight (dw); mean +/- SD) ...

Urban air quality, and its variability in space and time, is a critical issue for human exposure and health related studies. In this work, we investigated the intra-urban distribution of SO2, NOx, NO2, Benzene, Toluene, and Xylenes in ambient air in one of the world’s most polluted cities, Lanzhou, China. Measurements were contemporarily carried out at forty locations in four seasonal campaigns...