Abstract to the 26th NATO / CCMS International Technical Meeting on Air Pollution Modelling and its Application in Istanbul, Turkey

 

 

Local and Urban Effects of air pollution in southern Germany

 

Peter Suppan

 

Atmospheric Environmental Research
Institute for Meteorology and Climate Research (IMK-IFU)
Research Centre Karlsruhe GmbH
Kreuzeckbahnstr.
19
D-82467 Garmisch-Partenkirchen
Germany

 

Keytopic: Integrated Regional Modelling

 

Abstract:

 

 

The political changes in Europe with the opening of the East European Countries and the Reunion of Germany has changed the traffic situation in Central Europe dramatically. Especially in the South East of Germany in the greater area of Munich the traffic (air and ground) has increased significantly. The increasing vehicle movements in and around Munich (the airport of Munich has to manage more than 23 Million passengers a year) give a high contribution to the NOx and VOC emissions and therefore also to the air quality of the region. High O3 and NO2 concentrations in the vicinity of Munich during the summer reflect very well the influence of the traffic to the air pollution situation. To assess the influence of the emissions to the air pollution several modelling campaigns were performed in the greater area of Munich.

 

In the vicinity of Augsburg in May 2001 a measuring campaign and a modelling case study took place to assess the contribution of the city to the surrounding region. The results from the May campaign and of additional calculations in August 2001 show e.g. clearly the influence of the nearby highway to the air quality in that region.

 

Within the project MOBINET (Mobility in the conurbation Munich) new forms of mobility services, innovative traffic technologies and multimodal traffic management  (sustainable mobility) were the main tasks of interest and part of air quality modelling studies. A base case study and a future trend scenario with the incorporation of the MOBINET tasks were preformed with the Multiscale Climate Chemistry Model (MCCM). Due to the expected small contributions (<10 %) of the MOBINET tasks to the overall mobility the changes in the emission inventory and therefore in the air quality calculations are very small. On the other side trend scenarios including all future investigations on emission reductions show quite clear a decrease of air pollutants in terms of O3 and NO2.

 

The dispersion model with full photochemistry, which was used for the simulations is based on the well-documented fifth-generation NCAR/Penn State Mesoscale Model, MM5. MM5 includes a multiple-nesting capability, nonhydrostatic dynamics and FDDA capability as well as other options for modelling microphysical processes. Additional to this, two separate gas-phase chemistry mechanisms (RADM2 and RACM) with 39 and 47 chemical species respectively and particulate matter (PM10) as a passive tracer are included. The online coupling of meteorology and chemistry provides fully consistent results with no interpolation of data in contrast to off-line coupled chemistry and transport models.