Abstract
The study of air pollution is recent in West Africa. There is a lack of data on air pollution. However, some studies conducted in West Africa show that air quality is a concern. Population growth and massive vehicles imports are contributing to the deterioration of this air quality. In this work, we present the modelling of desert aerosols using a CTM Polair3D-SIREAM. The objective is to evaluate the ability of Polair3D-SIREAM to reproduce observations of PM10 and Aerosol Optical Thicknesses (AOT). A simulation with Polair3D-SIREAM was carried out in West Africa, focused on Ouagadougou (Burkina Faso) for 2007. The model of Marticorena and Bergametti (1995), MB95, was used to estimate desert aerosols emissions. The total emission of dust modelled is 52.2 Tg. For the evaluation of PM10, the simulated averages remained within the same orders of magnitude as the observed averages. Correlations are low in all the observation sites. The other indicators are similar to those found by Schmechtig et al. (2011). Performance criteria of Boylan and Russel (2006) are met for the observation sites of Ouagadougou and Ilorin (Nigeria). For the AOTs, the correlations are significantly improved, in particular, at the sites of Ouagadougou and Ilorin. Performance criteria of Boylan are met for all observation sites. However, the performance goals are only achieved for Ouagadougou and Ilorin.
Highlights
The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that in 2012, about 7 million people died prematurely due to air pollution
We present the modelling of desert aerosols using a chemistry-transport model (CTM) Polair3D-SIREAM
Note that we have modelled the dust emissions using wind speeds from the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) database without modification
Summary
The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that in 2012, about 7 million people died prematurely due to air pollution. Studies by Marticorena and Bergametti [9], Laurent et al [10], Engelstaedter et al [11], Miller et al [12], Ginoux et al [13], Formenti et al [14] and Goudie [15] have shown that the Sahara is the largest source of dust emissions in the world. This dust, in addition to its impact on health, acts on the attenuation of solar radiation and on the Earth’s climate [16]
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