Resolution of pollutant concentrations in the boundary layer using a fully 3D adaptive gridding technique

This paper investigates the solution of a 3D atmospheric dispersion problem using a time-dependent adaptive gridding technique. A cell-vertex finite volume scheme based on tetrahedral elements is used to solve the atmospheric diffusion equation. Preliminary studies of dispersion from a single source in stable, unstable and neutral boundary layers have been carried out. The results show the efficiency of using adaptive grids to represent accurately the structures of plumes in the boundary layer and also the advantage of this method compared to fixed methods for mesh refinement. Some comments about the interpolation of input data such as wind fields onto unstructured meshes are also made.