PERFORMANCE OF AERMOD SOFTWARE IN INDIAN SCENARIO

Environmental Engineering

Air quality modeling plays an important role in formulating air pollution control and management strategies by providing guidelines for better and more efficient air quality planning. In last few decades the urban air quality has been deteriorated in mega cities of India. Among air quality dispersion models, AERMOD is found one of the strong model used to evaluate the urban air quality. However, applications of these models are still limited in developing countries like India due to lack of availability of specific input data. Till now AERMOD is applied for different pollutants such as SO2, NO2, PM10, PM2.5 in various parts of India which shows that it has tendency of under-prediction to the observed values. The one of the reason behind under prediction is that AERMOD being sensitive to some of the surface characteristics parameters such as Albedo, Bowen ratio & surface roughness. Even though the applications of AERMOD has been started in India for EIA for source apportionment study & these surface parameters are not being taken into considerations which leads to erroneous result for policy level decisions. To make AERMOD model as robust model rigours validation for different scenarios shall be carried out. In this paper overview on performance of AERMOD air dispersion model for different locations, sources of air pollution & pollutants is studied to check its credibility. Moreover, the role of these surface parameters on model predictions is also discussed in this paper.

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