New methods of testing and simulating air quality should be considered in order to help policy makers have a more accurate understanding of how emissions affect air pollution levels, new research suggests.
In a review published in the Journal of the Air & Waste Management Association, the authors claim that current air quality modelling systems used in the US to perform simulations to help us understand how pollutants react in the atmosphere need to strike a balance between sufficient chemical detail and needless speculation to produce accurate results to help improve air quality.
The new paper provides recommendations for how to produce more accurate descriptions of atmospheric chemical reactions, and in-turn air quality simulations, in the fight to reduce dangerous emissions.
The production of air pollution from motor vehicles, industrial power plants, and fossil fuel emissions are determined by complex chemical reactions. To accurately simulate air pollution, air quality models solve sets of equations that mathematically describe the physical and chemical processes regulating the fate of emissions in the atmosphere. Lead author Professor William Stockwell from the University of Texas at El Paso explains, accurate simulations of air pollutants require updated and accurate descriptions of the chemical processes for the changing chemical regimes of the atmosphere and emerging contaminants of concern.
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