An emission time series generator for pollutant release modelling in urban areas

Abstract

Dynamic priority pollutant (PP) fate models are being developed to assess appropriate strategies for limiting the release of PPs from urban sources and for treating PPs on a variety of spatial scales. Different possible sources of PP releases were mapped and both their release pattern and release factors were quantified as detailed as possible. This paper focuses on the link between the gathered PP sources data and the dynamic models of the urban environment. This link consists of (1) a method for the quantitative and structured storage of temporal emission pattern information, (2) the retrieval of spatial emission source data from a GIS covering the studied urban area, (3) the coupling of the (GIS-based) spatial emission source data with temporal emission pattern information and (4) the generation of PP release time series to feed the dynamic sewer catchment model. Steps 3 and 4 were included as the main features of a dedicated software tool. Finally, this paper also illustrates the method's applicability to generate model input time series for generic pollutants (N, P and COD/BOD) in addition to priority pollutants.