Challenges of Air Pollution Modeling and its Application in the Next Millennium

Abstract

In the opening talk of this conference, Peter Bultjes summarized the state-of-the-art in air pollution modeling. In this paper, I will discuss some of the challenges that face us, and make suggestions on how we might be able to address them in the future. A reasonable way of guessing at what the future holds is to extrapolate “data points” from the past. So, I will briefly examine the history of air pollution modeling to discern the trends that might determine the future. As is normally done, air pollution models will be classified according to the scales of application. Short-range models apply to space scales of tens of kilometers, while urban and long-range transport models apply to larger scales. This classification is useful because, typically, models at these two scales are based on different mathematical frameworks. Shortrange models generally use a Lagrangian framework to focus on a single plume from a source. Long-range models use a Eulerian framework to account for interaction between plumes from multiple sources. While this distinction might be useful at this time, it may well disappear in the future for reasons I will discuss in the paper.