China’s cities are growing faster, more than in other countries. The presence of conspicuous number of construction
yards can affect seriously the air quality of the cities, moreover the PM10 emissions from these sources are still underestimate. A
monitoring campaign and model simulation results are presented in this paper. The aim of the project, conduct in the city of
Shanghai, was to evaluate a dust emission factor from the constructions sites. A first assessment activity was developed from
October to November 2006, in the Peng Xin Mansion construction site, where 8 PM10 sequential samplers and 2 meteorological
towers, were deployed. The data collected were used to improve a new simplify methodology, also a Gaussian plume model
AERMOD was rund. Results from the air dispersion model comes by different emission factors calculated from two procedures, one
from the AP-42 Environmental Protection Agency (EPA-USA) and the second from an empirical areal emission factor. The first
procedure assigns different sources depending on construction activities and in this case no good results were achieved. The reason
was identify in the lack of a knowledge regarding the source locations depending on schedule time, the specific employed
machinery and the detailed construction operations. The second procedure, based on the determination, from the measured data, of
an areal emission factor, gave, for 6 selected days, good results regarding the trends and the values obtained comparing with the
measured data. Considering the results obtained, we found for the construction site, one seasonal emission factor: the value is 1.8
g/(m2*sec) of PM10 emitted. At the end to better understand the role of the construction yards in the air quality budget in a city of
Shanghai we use the estimated emission factor as input in the AERMOD model
