TECHNICAL UNIVERITY OF MADRID (UPM) COMPUTER SCIENCE SCHOOL
ENVIRONMENTAL SOFTWARE AND MODELLING GROUP
Roberto San Jose is a professor in Computer Science School and Director of the Environmental Software and Modelling Group. He has a long background on Air Pollution Modelling since 1980, that is more than 40 years. He has published more than 50 JCR papers and more than 200 papers in international Journas and participated in More than 25 EU projects and 100 private contracs.

Presenter of 1 Presentation

MODELING THE EFFECTS OF NATURE-BASED SOLUTIONS (NBS) ON URBAN AIR QUALITY USING CFD MODEL PALM4U

Session Type
Academic Sessions
Date
02/24/2022
Session Time
11:30 AM - 12:40 PM
Room

Hall C

Lecture Time
11:30 AM - 11:40 AM

Abstract

Abstract Body

Nature-based solutions will play an essential role in urban planning because their potential to reduce the air pollution concentrations. This study investigates the effects of a green space in one of the most polluted areas of the Madrid (Spain) city for a week of June 2017, when contribution of biogenic VOC emissions to ozone formation is important. The PALM4U (BMBF, DE) computational fluid dynamics (CFD), which includes aerodynamics, energy fluxes, chemical and deposition effects, was used to simulate pollutant dispersion for different biogenic emissions scenarios from trees, under a real morphological and micrometeorological environment with very high spatial resolution (5 m). We have used a Large Eddy Simulation (LES) approach which requires high performance computational resources (400 cores in a supercomputer environment). The simulated scenarios are: 1. non emission from the trees to isolate the effect of the biogenic emissions; 2. change the tree species from deciduous broad leaf to evergreen needles and 3. remove trees to isolate the combined effects of the emissions and turbulence. The first two scenarios affects to fundamental processes in the atmospheric pollution, such as energy balance, emission rates and the deposition velocity. Meteorological and chemical boundary conditions are supplied by a WRF/Chem (NCAR, US) model simulation up to 1 km of spatial resolution. The analysis shows that there are non uniform effects (positive and negative) on the concentrations of pollutants (NO2 and O3) over all computational domain, 1 km by 1km. The simulations show that trees have direct effects on air pollution (emission and deposition) and indirect effects in the energy fluxes, temperature and ventilation processes. The performance analysis shows that this model (PALM$U) reproduce successfully pollutant dispersion with the boundary and top conditions supplied by the WRF/Chem simulation taking into account the real building morphology and water green areas. The comparison between observed concentrations in a local monitoring station and the model results shows an excellent performance. This study contributes to reduce knowledge gaps relating to the contribution of nature base solutions to improve air quality.

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