Dependence of urban air pollutants on meteorology

Abstract

Dependence of air pollutants on meteorology is presented with the aim of understanding the governing processes pollutants phase interaction. Intensive measurements of particulate matter (PM 10) and gaseous materials (e.g., CO, NO 2, SO 2, and O 3) are carried out regularly in 2002 at 14 measurement sites distributed over the whole territory of Great Cairo by the Egyptian Environmental Affairs Agency to assess the characteristics of air pollutants. The discussions in this work are based upon measurements performed at Abbassiya site as a case study. The nature of the contributing sources has been investigated and some attempts have been made to indicate the role played by neighboring regions in determining the air quality at the site mentioned. The results hint that, wind direction was found to have an influence not only on pollutant concentrations but also on the correlation between pollutants. As expected, the pollutants associated with traffic were at highest ambient concentration levels when wind speed was low. At higher wind speeds, dust and sand from the surrounding desert was entrained by the wind, thus contributing to ambient particulate matter levels. We also found that, the highest average concentration for NO 2 and O 3 occurred at humidity ≤ 40% indicative for strong vertical mixing. For CO, SO 2 and PM 10 the highest average concentrations occurred at humidity above 80%.