Intercomparison of atmospheric dispersion models

An intercomparison between Gaussian, Gaussian segmented plumes and Lagrangian codes is presented. The codes chosen for the simulation of a gaseous emission under real meteorological conditions were AERMOD, HPDM, PCCOSYMA and HYSPLIT. The emission source was located at 37.35°N and 78.24°W in a flat terrain. The meteorological data were obtained from RAMS code output. The AERMOD and HPDM meteorological preprocessors results were analyzed. The main differences found are originated in the sensible heat flux (SHTF) and u* (friction velocity) computation, whose values impact directly on the Monin–Obukov length and mixing height calculation. These differences and the strong dependence of the results on them indicate that more development should still be done in order to improve the algorithms for the meteorological variables calculations, mainly during stable conditions. A more realistic description is performed by the segmented Gaussian plume model (PCCOSYMA) respect to the Gaussian ones (AERMOD, HPDM) because it limits the plume length along the wind direction. It also predicts reasonably well the contaminant cloud rotation respect to the Lagrangian code (HYSPLIT) as no major difference between the wind field and the wind at the source location is present in the analyzed case. During the stable hours, HPDM calculates the most stable situation and the lowest mixing heights. Because of this there is a considerable discrepancy in the maximum ground level concentration respect to the other codes. While during the unstable hours HPDM calculates the most unstable situation, nevertheless the maximum ground level concentrations predicted by all the Gaussian and Lagrangian codes are comparable.