Irregularly emitting air pollution sources acute

Authors: BM Balter MV Faminskaya

Publish Date: 2016/08/26

Volume: 10, Issue: 4, Pages: 401-409

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Abstract

Intermittent irregular sources of air pollution when used in dispersion modeling can exaggerate the acute health risk due to improbable coincidence of release with the worstcase meteorological conditions This problem is alleviated by randomizing the moments of emission and applying the Monte Carlo method to obtain the realistic expected yearly maxima of hourly concentrations/risks Emissions are modeled as irregular “pulses” possibly with additional constraints on timing Such are major emission sources in important industries oil refineries gas extraction cement production etc We have tested the approach in ~100 projects for industrial plants in Russia and obtained considerable reductions in estimated acute health risks up to two orders of magnitude depending on the level of intermittency of sources These corrections to unrealistically high worstcase concentration values at nearby populated areas are in many cases a key to obtaining reasonable exclusion/protection zones for plants To our knowledge such a body of results on intermittent irregular sources is unique and it can be useful especially for developing countries where the exact timeline of emissions is often unknown Taking intermittency into account is also known to be an important step toward compliance with 1h US National Ambient Air Quality Standard We provide a detailed description of the Monte Carlo algorithm used We compare Monte Carlo with the usual quantilebased approach to peak values they agree when quantile is dependent on intermittency The nonlinearity of maximum function gives rise to some counterintuitive phenomena which call for refinement of risk definition for intermittent irregular sources

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