The relationship between the ATDL model and the statistical distributions of wind speed and pollution data

Abstract By examining the statistical distributions for TSP and acid gas data together with wind speed data, it is shown here that the ATDL model of Gifford and Hanna (1973) predicts certain statistics of these data sets well, especially for daily average data, but not the average relationship between air pollution and wind speed data monitored at the same time. Specifically, the model performs well in the 30- to 70-percentile range of the statistical distributions. The results demonstrate why the ATDL model often works between air pollution data and wind speed data collected at different sites. They also explain the weak dependence of the ATDL model parameters on atmospheric stability found by Hanna (1971). Finally, it is shown that the medians and not the means should be used when estimating the ATDL model parameters.