Abstract
An appropriate method for evaluating the air quality of a certain area is to contrast the actual air pollution levels to the critical ones, prescribed in the legislative standards. The application of numerical simulation models for assessing the real air quality status is allowed by the legislation of the European Community (EC). This approach is preferable, especially when the area of interest is relatively big and/or the network of measurement stations is sparse, and the available observational data are scarce, respectively. Such method is very efficient for similar assessment studies due to continuous spatio-temporal coverage of the obtained results. In the study the values of the concentration of the harmful substances sulphur dioxide, (SO2), nitrogen dioxide (NO2), particulate matter - coarse (PM10) and fine (PM2.5) fraction, ozone (O3), carbon monoxide (CO) and ammonia (NH3) in the surface layer obtained from modelling simulations with resolution 10 km on hourly bases are taken to calculate the necessary statistical quantities which are used for comparison with the corresponding critical levels, prescribed in the EC directives. For part of them (PM2.5, CO and NH3) this is done for first time with such resolution. The computational grid covers Bulgaria entirely and some surrounding territories and the calculations are made for every year in the period 1991–2000. The averaged over the whole time slice results can be treated as representative for the air quality situation of the last decade of the former century.
Highlights
Clean air is essential for a good quality of life and it enhances the social well-being of European citizens
There is common scientific understanding that all the important air quality problems mentioned above are strongly interrelated. All these pollutants are subject to long-range transport and various transformations in the atmosphere, so that concentrations experienced at a given site originate from a large number of diverse emission sources across Europe
In the study the values of the concentration of seven harmful substances in the surface layer, namely sulphur dioxide, (SO2), nitrogen dioxide (NO2), particulate matter - coarse (PM10: particulate matter which passes through a size-selective inlet with a 50% efficiency cut-off at 10 μm aerodynamic diameter) and fine (PM2.5: same as PM10, but for 2.5 μm) fraction, ozone (O3), carbon monoxide (CO) and ammonia (NH3), obtained from high-resolution modelling simulations on hourly bases, are taken
Summary
Clean air is essential for a good quality of life and it enhances the social well-being of European citizens. The actual setting of air quality limit values (AQLVs) and alert thresholds for specific pollutants is done via the so-called Daughter Directives, namely
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