Abstract
Large-scale atmospheric pollutant spreading via volcano eruptions and industrial accidents may have serious effects on our life. However, many students and non-experts are generally not aware of the fact that pollutant clouds do not disperse in the atmosphere like dye blobs on clothes. Rather, an initially compact pollutant cloud soon becomes strongly stretched with filamentary and folded structure. This is the result of the chaotic behaviour of advection of pollutants in 3-D flows, i.e., the advection dynamics of pollutants shows the typical characteristics such as sensitivity to the initial conditions, irregular motion, and complicated but well-organized (fractal) structures. This study presents possible applications of a software called RePLaT-Chaos by means of which the characteristics of the long-range atmospheric spreading of volcanic ash clouds and other pollutants can be investigated in an easy and interactive way. This application is also a suitable tool for studying the chaotic features of the advection and determines two quantities which describe the chaoticity of the advection processes: the stretching rate quantifies the strength of the exponential stretching of pollutant clouds; and the escape rate characterizes the rate of the rapidity by which the settling particles of a pollutant cloud leave the atmosphere.
Highlights
Air pollution is an important environmental issue, especially, in cases when pollutants travel thousands of kilometers, affecting air quality far away from their initial source
To get a first impression about the main characteristics of atmospheric pollutant spreading by means of Real Particle Lagrangian Trajectory (RePLaT)-Chaos, Figure 1 shows the simulation of the spreading of a single, initially compact ash cloud of height of 4 km injected into the atmosphere due to the eruption of the Eyjafjallajökull on 14 April 2010 at 06:00 UTC
The Lagrangian particle-tracking trajectory model RePLaT-Chaos is introduced and is shown to be applicable for the study of the main features of atmospheric pollutant spreading, which are discussed in detail
Summary
Air pollution is an important environmental issue, especially, in cases when pollutants travel thousands of kilometers, affecting air quality far away from their initial source. In April and May 2010 the eruptions of the Icelandic Eyjafjallajökull volcano resulted in airspace closures across Europe. The ash particles and gases injected high into the atmosphere were transported mostly by westerly and northwesterly winds towards Europe, and small particles often travelled thousands of kilometers before being removed from the atmosphere. At the beginning of May, due to the northerly flows in the Atlantic region, the ash plumes reached even the Iberian Peninsula within three to five days at an altitude as high as 11–12 km [6,7], and volcanic plumes from the Eyjafjallajökull eruptions were detected as far as Western Siberia, Russia, about 5000 km away
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