Balancing Externalities and Industrial Costs in Air Quality Planning

When adopting regional plans aimed at improving air quality, environmental authorities are often faced with the relevant costs that the adoption of abatement measures implies. On the other hand, scientific literature has well documented damages due to air pollution impact on human health and ecosystems. This paper proposes a tool that allows balancing these two viewpoints by defining the efficient set of measures in a multi-objective perspective. Despite both external (health related) and internal (industrial/emission abatement related) costs can be measured in the same unit, namely money, it appears unacceptable to add them together as in a cost-benefit analysis, since they pertain to quite different social groups. The tool proposed in this paper can thus be seen as a support to actual decision makers and allows them to compare in a ponderable way the pros and cons of any abatement policy. This contrasts what normally happens when air quality health impacts are simply defined as the satisfaction of a constraint at few specific points in space (coincident with the presence of measurement gauges). Indeed, both population and ecosystems are distributed in a non-uniform way on a territory and thus sparse point measurements of pollutant concentrations or other related air quality indicators may be only loosely related with the real impacts of air quality. An application of the tool to a European region (Lombardy, Italy) is presented with particular reference to PM10 and Ozone pollution problems. These are particularly difficult to cope with, since these pollutants are mainly formed in the atmosphere (secondary pollutants) and thus their concentration depends on chemical physical processes involving in different way on one side the emission of precursors and, on the other, the local meteorological conditions.JRC.H.2-Air and Climat

VALIDATION OF MESOSCALE METEOROLOGICAL SIMULATION OVER PO VALLEY FOR AIR QUALITY APPLICATIONS

Very high ground level concentrations of PM in winter and of ozone in summer often occur in Northern Italy, due to the high anthropogenic emissions and frequent stagnant meteorological conditions that characterize the area. These problems are not only related to urban, but also to suburban areas through the entire Po Valley. In such a situation it is important to use deterministic Chemical Transport Models, that allows to evaluate the effect of different air quality control policies on secondary pollution concentrations. Chemical Transport Models generally are part of more complex deterministic modelling systems, encompassing also emission models, meteorological models, and initial and boundary condition processors. Meteorological models are an important module of deterministic modelling systems and, due to their complexity, require high computational costs to perform simulations. In fact they solve a full set of non-hydrostatic equations that describe atmospheric dynamics and thermodynamics, and conservation equations, usually considering two-way interacting nested domains. Within the HPC-EUROPA (Pan-European Research Infrastructure on High Performance Computing) cooperation project, that allows to use clusters of CPUs all around Europe, the meteorological fields over Northern Italy were simulated using RAMS4.4 in parallel mode, creating a database for future air quality assessments. In the present work a CPUs cluster of the Italian computing centre CINECA have been used. The meteorological simulations have been performed considering three nested grids. The first grid covers an area that encompasses the entire Europe, the second grid is focused on Mediterranean sea, while the third one is limited to the Po Valley area. The spatial resolution of the three grids is respectively 128 km, 32 km and 8 km. The number of cells for the three grids is respectively 40x40, 86x86 and 102x102, with 33 vertical levels covering the domain from surface to roughly 20 km height. The entire 2004 year has been simulated through 72 simulations of 126 hours each, considering a spin-up time of 6 hours and 16 CPUs each simulation. In this paper the model configuration and the validation of the simulated meteorological fields are presented

A Framework for Integrated Assessment Modelling

“Air quality plans” according to Air Quality Directive 2008/50/EC Art. 23 are the strategic element to be developed, with the aim to reliably meet ambient air quality standards in a cost-effective way. This chapter provides a general framework to develop and assess such plans along the lines of the European Commission’s basic ideas to implement effective emission reduction measures at local, region, and national level. This methodological point of view also allows to analyse the existing integrated approaches

Urban PM2.5 Atlas: Air Quality in European cities

Many European cities suffer from poor air quality and regularly exceed both the European standards prescribed by the Air Quality Directive and the guidelines recommended by the World Health Organization. This is particularly the case for fine particulate matter (PM10) for which both the daily and yearly average limit values are regularly exceeded in many cities and several regions in Europe. Similar conclusions hold for PM2.5 where few cities manage to keep concentrations below the levels recommended by the WHO. Actions have been proposed and taken at the international, national and urban scales to reduce air pollution. While they have undoubtedly resulted in an overall improvement of the air quality over the years, there are still problems which are localised in specific regions and many cities. A key issue is thus to determine at which scale to act in order to abate these remaining air pollution problems most effectively. Central to this for cities, is a quantitative assessment of the different origins of air pollution in the city (urban, regional, national and transboundary) to support the design of efficient and effective air quality plans, which are a legal obligation for countries and regions whenever exceedances occur. The “Screening for High Emission Reduction Potentials for Air quality” tool (SHERPA) has been developed by the Joint Research Centre to quantify the origins of air pollution in cities and regions. In this Atlas, both the spatial (urban, country…) and sectoral (transport, residential, agriculture…) contributions are quantified for 150 European urban areas in Europe, where many of the current exceedances to the air quality EU limit values and WHO guidelines are reported. There is a need to provide information to improve air quality policy governance, to support authorities in choosing the most efficient actions at the appropriate administrative level and scale. In particular, actions at the local level focusing on the urban scale and at national/international level needs to be carefully balanced. Key conclusions are: • For many cities, local actions at the city scale are an effective means of improving air quality in that city. The overall conclusion is that cities have a role to play by taking actions at their own scale. It is important to emphasise that the emissions in cities contribute significantly to country and EU overall PM concentrations, reinforcing the important role of cities in reducing the air pollution through a multilevel approach. • Impacts of abatement measures on air quality are city specific The impact of a given abatement measure on air quality differs from city to city, even for cities that are located in the same country. Actions taken at different scales or in different activity sectors therefore lead to impacts on air quality that are city-specific. The diversity of possible responses to abatement measures stresses the need to take into account these city-specific circumstances when designing air quality plans. Actions that are efficient in one city might not be efficient in others. • Sectoral measures addressing agriculture at country or EU scale would have a clear benefit on urban air quality. Although agricultural emissions are limited in the "city" as defined here, agriculture considerably impacts air quality in many EU cities. The extent of the impact of agriculture on air quality is indicative of the potential of EU- or country-wide measures addressing this sector. Moreover, other sectoral measures can have an important potential at the urban scale even though they are applied at EU or country scale. This is the case of road transport where the EURO norms are, in practice, most effective in the areas where traffic is most important, i.e. cities.JRC.C.5-Air and Climat

Elementi di trasmissione del calore

Introduzione ; concetti fondamentali di conduzione termica ; conduzione termica in regime stazionario ; conduzione termica in regime variabile ; analisi numerica nei problemi do conduzione ; concetti fondamentali di convezione termica ; convezione forzata ; convezione naturale ; scambio termico in ebollizione e condensazione ; concetti fondamentali di radiazione termica ; scambio termico per radiazione ; scambiatori di calore ; problemi termici negli edifici

DOI:10.1068/htwu9

Thermodynamic optimisation in cryogenic insulation systems: dependence upon thermophysical conditions of the material