Evaluation of traffic producing turbulence schemes within operational street pollution models using roadside measurements

Low wind scenarios are associated with the worst air pollution episodes in urban street canyons. Under these conditions, operational dispersion models often over-predict pollutant concentration. Traffic-producing turbulence (TPT) becomes dominant in mixing and diluting traffic-related pollutants under low wind speed conditions. Determining the TPT effect on the flow and dispersion patterns within urban street canyons is crucial for the development of detailed operational dispersion models for assessing urban air quality. Several spatially averaged TPT formulations have been recently proposed in the literature. However, only a few attempts have been made so far to incorporate different TPT schemes into operational dispersion models and evaluate their performance using measurements. In this paper, several TPT schemes presented in literature were evaluated. Two TPT schemes were implemented in the well-validated Windows version of the Danish Operational Street Pollution Model (WinOSPM). Both formulations were evaluated using six independent datasets of roadside CO concentrations collected in European cities. Statistical and sensitivity analyses were undertaken to test the performance of the different formulations. The results showed that the overall model performance was significantly sensitive to the TPT schemes adopted. The model performance improved when a detailed characterisation of the TPT, depending on the density of road traffic, was used. (C) 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.