A Tool to Evaluate the Air Quality Impact of Industrial Plants by Using MM5-CMAQ

The impact on air quality due to industrial activities has been a traditional topic in air pollution modeling. Nowadays, new generation of air quality modeling (third generation) is contributing with new and unsuspected tools for inspecting the impact on air pollution concentrations due to industrial activities. The capability of today’s mathematical modeling tools to evaluate the impact of industrial emissions on primary and secondary air pollution concentrations is substantially better that just a few years ago mainly due to advances on environmental sciences and also because of the extraordinary advance on computer power capabilities. TEAP (A tool to evaluate the air quality impact of industrial plants) is a tool (and also an accepted EUREKA project) which will allow to industrial manager to take decisions related to industrial plant emission reduction strategies based on the air quality forecasts produced by TEAP tool. TEAP tool will cover an extense region (50–100 km or more) surrounding the industrial plant and will produce air quality forecasts up to 72 hours in advance by simulating the three dimensional domain centered on the industrial plant along 120 hour simulation period. The simulations will cover the ON (with the industrial plant emitting) and OFF (without the industrial plant emitting) modes. TEAP will analyze both simulations and present the post-process analysis (PA). The PA capability will allow to investigate the location (grid cell) and time (time step) where the impact of industrial emissions on primary and secondary air concentrations is maximum. This methodology can be extended to several simulations to analyze the impact of different emission reduction scenario percentages. In this contribution we will show the results by using MM5-CMAQ over the Madrid domain and using one large point industrial source located at the north area of Madrid city. Results show that TEAP can be an excellent tool to analyze the impact of industrial emissions and an essential tool for the industrial manager for an emission reduction strategy policy.