Author(s)

M. J. Assael, M. Delaki & K. Kakosimos

Abstract

Air quality in urban environments can today be modelled by a large number of computer models (empirical, box models, CFD). OSPM (Operational Street Pollution Model) is one of the most widely used empirical-box models due to its simplicity and its very good performance. However, in most cases the necessary data, even for such simple computations, are not all available, leading to large errors, especially when employed for future planning. The City of Thessaloniki (Greece) was studied as an example, as although few input-data are available, there are enough measurements to validate the model’s results. The current work proposes a methodology for dealing with this lack of data, confirmed by comparison with measured values. Following that, a sensitivity analysis for the most common input parameters is presented. Finally, OSPM is employed to predict the air quality in some highly-possible future scenarios. Keywords: atmospheric pollution, simulation, models, OSPM. 1 Introduction Air pollution is one of the most severe problems in urban areas. In recent years, the Thermophysical Properties Laboratory of Chemical Engineering Department in Aristotle University has focused on the study of the atmospheric pollution of the historical centre of Thessaloniki. In order to estimate the air pollution, solely due to traffic, the well-known OSPM model [1], is employed. This model has been widely used in the past [2] and validated for similar cases [3, 4].

Keywords

atmospheric pollution, simulation, models, OSPM.