Challenges of high-fidelity air quality modeling in urban environments – PALM sensitivity study during stable conditions

Abstract

Abstract. Urban air quality is an important part of human well-being, and its detailed and precise modeling is important for efficient urban planning. In this study the potential sources of errors in large eddy simulation (LES) runs of the PALM model in stable conditions for a high-traffic residential area in Prague, Czech Republic, with a focus on street canyon ventilation, are investigated. The evaluation of the PALM model simulations against observations obtained during a dedicated campaign revealed unrealistically high concentrations of modeled air pollutants for a short period during a winter inversion episode. To identify potential reasons, the sensitivities of the model to changes in meteorological boundary conditions and adjustments of model parameters were tested. The model adaptations included adding the anthropogenic heat from cars, setting a bottom limit of the subgrid-scale turbulent kinetic energy (TKE), adjusting the profiles of parameters of the synthetic turbulence generator in PALM, and limiting the model time step. The study confirmed the crucial role of the correct meteorological boundary conditions for realistic air quality modeling during stable conditions. Besides this, the studied adjustments of the model parameters proved to have a significant impact in these stable conditions, resulting in a decrease in concentration overestimation in the range 30 %–66 % while exhibiting a negligible influence on model results during the rest of the episode. This suggested that the inclusion or improvement of these processes in PALM is desirable despite their negligible impact in most other conditions. Moreover, the time step limitation test revealed numerical inaccuracies caused by discretization errors which occurred during such extremely stable conditions.