Air quality studies

Air quality modelling (dispersion studies) assesses a dispersion of pollutants concentration in area with sophisticated computational tools – air pollution models. Using of the dispersion studies is very wide:

For each investment project the dispersion studies are:

• a material which is often required for municipals’ and local governments’ decision in all stages of the project preparation (from urban plan to construction permission)
• a standard part of Notification and Documentation of EIA in accordance with Act 100/2001 Coll.
• a mandatory part of the application for a permission of stationary source location (boiler plants, technology)

For the urban plans and development concepts the dispersion studies represent:

• a groundwork for comparison of several scenario (especially in transportation and power engineering)
• a standard part of SEA – Strategic environmental assessment
• a basis for suitable placement of residential buildings areas and other “air pollution sensitive” buildings (schools, hospitals), or vice versa new sources of air pollution (heating plant, industry zone, etc.)

To the public and local authorities the dispersion studies provide also:

• the large scale information about air quality in area of interest beyond the reach of measurement stations

• information of share of individual sources or their groups (transportation, industry, heating) in total level of air pollution

• a possibility of defining the extent of localities with ambient air quality above limits and identification of major source of pollution
• the presentation materials, for example for Statistical Environmental Yearbook
• a detailed and exact information about the emissions and air pollution situation within all sites – for purpose of permitting new sources
• a groundwork for position of measuring stations optimization

Processing of all kinds of dispersion studies belongs to the most common services which our studio provides. We carry out emission and air quality assessments for all types of sources of pollution:

• all size of combustion sources (small, medium, large) – boiler rooms, heating plants, power plants, combined heat and power plants, complex of local heated houses, etc.

• garages, parking places, petrol stations
• storage areas, logistics centres, transfer areas, terminals
• highways, roads and railways

• crossroads – grade-separated, circular, light-controlled and uncontrolled

• industry companies
• quarries and other mining activities

• wastewater treatment plants
• dustiness from open areas (e.g. from agriculture operation)
• alternative sources of electric power and so on.

We carry out the dispersion studies for varied range of area, from single localities (near surrounding of investment project) through the larger areas (e. g. neighborhood of road, part of the town) and urban areas to regional and countrywide studies.

We develop and improve the methodology procedure for solving the dispersion studies – it is not only distributed models MEFA-06 (emission from transportation) and ATEM (pollution dispersion model), but also number of other computational methods – e. g. impacts of cold starts from transportation, impacts of braking and accelerating cars on the crossroads, determination of indirect dustiness, emission from quarry blasting, particulate matter (PM2,5) emission factors, heavy metal emission factors and emission factors of hydrocarbons in the resuspended dust road etc. This allows to successfully solve unusual or very complicated assignments of dispersion studies.

All model calculation are processed in a geographic information system so that they can be projected at any time above the map or incorporated into the client application. This is particularly important for evaluating the urban plans (it is possible to reflect the different drawing of urban plans above the emission load maps) and for the authorities of cities or regions during administrative activities. The outputs of our dispersion studies are used this way for e. g. Atlas of the Prague’s Environment.

The dispersion studies in Prague and some other cities are worked on over already processed study for the whole city – the background air pollution. This procedure allows to evaluate exactly the expected air quality conditions and impacts of given project in relation to ambient air quality standards, because the assessment includes the impacts of all sources which affect the area of interest, not only the impact of one project.