On prediction of wind-borne plumes with simple models of turbulenttransport

Abstract

The dispersion of pollutants from the ground by turbulent winds is difficult to model in general. However, for flat homogeneous terrain and steady wind conditions, if the wind profile is modeled with a power-law dependence on height, the advection-dispersion equation has an exact solution. In this paper the analytical solution is compared to a numerical simulation of the coupled air-ground system for a leaking underground gas storage, with a power-law velocity profile that was fit to the logarithmic velocity profile used in the simulation. The two methods produced similar results far from the boundaries, but the boundary conditions had a strong effect; the simulation imposed boundary conditions at the edge of a finite domain while the analytic solution imposes them at infinity. The reverse seepage from air to ground was shown in the simulation to be very small, and the sharp contrast between time scales suggests that air and ground can be modeled separately, with gas emissions from the ground model used as inputs to the air model

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