Abstract
Air pollutant levels over Denmark are simulated using the high resolution THOR model system for the years 1979–2015. The system employs the Danish Eulerian Hemispheric Model (DEHM), coupled to the Urban Background Model (UBM) that covers the whole of Denmark on a 1 km spatial resolution. This study evaluates the performance of the model system in simulating hourly, daily, monthly and yearly mean ozone (O3), nitrogen oxides (NOx) and particulate matter (PM10 and PM2.5) concentrations using surface measurements from eight Danish monitoring stations between 1990 and 2015. The spatial and temporal variability of air pollutants and emissions are also investigated to better understand the air pollution trends over Denmark during this 37 year period.
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References
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Acknowledgements
This work is funded by the Danish Center for Energy and Environment, Aarhus University and NordForsk under the Nordic Programme on Health and Welfare. Project #75007: Understanding the link between air pollution and distribution of related health impacts and welfare in the Nordic countries (NordicWelfAir).
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Questioner 1: Greg Yardwood
Question: How do you avoid double counting the air quality impacts (e.g. on NO2 or O3 concentrations in Aarhus) of Danish emissions if they are included both in the DEHM and UBM models?
Answer: THE DEHM model provides the boundary conditions to the UBM model and these two models run separately. UBM takes into account the emissions up to 30 km upwind from all the individual receptor points and at the end of the 30 km trajectory, the boundary conditions are given by DEHM.
Questioner 2: Peter Viaene
Question: Don’t you commit an error by removing the Danish emissions from your domain to calculate the background?
Answer: We do not remove the Danish emission from our DEHM model, we replace the EMEP emissions over Denmark with the SPREAD emission for Denmark in order to have consistent emissions in both DEHM and UBM models and to aply the best available emission data on a high resolution.
Questioner 3: George Tsegas
Question: Which particular measures are taken in order to avoid multiple counting of emissions in finer-scale model?
Answer: The UBM model is run using background concentrations from the DEHM model. In order to avoid double counting, for each grid cell in the UBM model, the background value is calculated using the concentration value of the DEHM grid cell that corresponds to the 30 km upwind to the particular UBM grid cell (see also question 1).
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Im, U. et al. (2018). Air Pollutant Trends over Denmark over the Last 37 Years as Simulated by the Integrated Model System THOR. In: Mensink, C., Kallos, G. (eds) Air Pollution Modeling and its Application XXV. ITM 2016. Springer Proceedings in Complexity. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-57645-9_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-57645-9_8
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