Air Mass Trajectories to Estimate the “Most Likely” Areas to Be Affected by the Release of Hazardous Materials in the Atmosphere—Feasibility Study

Miguel Ángel Hernández-Ceballos,Luca De Felice

doi:10.3390/atmos10050253

Miguel Ángel Hernández-Ceballos, Luca De Felice

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3390/atmos10050253

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Journal: Atmosphere	Publication Date: May 8, 2019
Citations: 5	License type: CC BY 4.0

Affiliation: Joint Research Centre

Abstract

Countries continuously review and improve their Emergency Preparedness and Response (EP&R) arrangements and capabilities to take agile and rapid actions with the intent of minimizing health, environmental and economic impacts of potential harmful releases into the atmosphere. One of the specific topics within the EP&R field is the estimation of the areas that might be affected. A proposal is presented to estimate the spatial distribution of the released material. The methodology combines the computation of air mass trajectories and the elaboration of density maps from the corresponding end-point positions. To this purpose, density maps are created in a three-way procedure; first, forward trajectories are calculated from a certain location and for a long period of time, e.g., a decade; second, the selected end-point positions are aggregated in a density field by applying the kernel density estimation method, and then the density field is visualized. The final product reports the areas with the longest residence time of air masses, and hence, the areas “most likely” to be affected and where the deposit may be substantial. The usefulness of this method is evaluated taking as reference a ten-year period (2007–2016) and against two different radioactive release scenarios, such as the Chernobyl accident and the Algeciras release. While far from being fully comprehensive, as only meteorological data are used, the performance of this method is reasonably efficient, and hence, it is a desirable alternative to estimating those areas potentially affected by a substantial deposit following the releases of a harmful material in the atmosphere.

Highlights

In the context of the effective management of crises and disasters, which is a global challenge, the risk of an accident releasing airborne harmful material to the atmosphere, like radioactive, chemical or bacteriological active substances, cannot be ruled out
To evaluate the bias of our meteorological approach, the results obtained in the density maps are qualitatively compared with bibliography regarding the depositional analysis of each case study
The three maps display a wider area corresponding to the highest density values to the radioactive plume continued its movement to the north-west over the Mediterranean Sea the the east of the release site, along the southern Mediterranean coast of the Iberian Peninsula

Summary

Introduction

In the context of the effective management of crises and disasters, which is a global challenge, the risk of an accident releasing airborne harmful material to the atmosphere, like radioactive, chemical or bacteriological active substances, cannot be ruled out To face these kinds of events, it is well recognized that good preparedness substantially improves the emergency response. The early phase of a harmful release to the atmosphere is a period usually characterized by large uncertainty in the source term release characteristics and the lack of field measurements Within this period, to have available a prior estimation of the possible atmospheric transport and dispersion of the released material, and the likely areas to be affected by the plume, is of importance to decision makers and emergency managers in an attempt at minimizing its health and environmental impacts.

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