Investigation of multi-dimensional computational models for calculating pollutant transport

A performance study of five numerical solution algorithms for multi-dimensional advection-diffusion prediction on mesoscale grids was made. Test problems include transport of point and distributed sources, and a simulation of a continuous source. In all cases, analytical solutions are available to assess relative accuracy. The particle-in-cell and second-moment algorithms, both of which employ sub-grid resolution coupled with Lagrangian advection, exhibit superior accuracy in modeling a point source release. For modeling of a distributed source, algorithms based upon the pseudospectral and finite element interpolation concepts, exhibit improved accuracy on practical discretizations.