Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
Fig. 1.
The chain of models (LMDz-INCA and CHIMERE) used at IPSL
One of the major advances regional modelling has brought is the description of
patterns of air pollutants such as city plumes, large-scale episodes and transport,
which helps explaining the time evolution observed of concentrations at individual
sites. The development of European-scale photochemical smog episode in several
connected large-scale plumes built from the aggregation of individual city plumes
was particularly clear in simulations of the August 2003 episode using CHIMERE
(Vautard et al., 2005). By contrast the pointwise representation provided by
observations only could not clearly identify the dynamical build-up of the episode
(see
Fig. 2).
What was also demonstrated is that during such episodes several
weakly connected “air basins” could be identified in Europe. For instance the
region between Marseille and Northern Italy appears connected, but disconnected
from Northern Europe.
Fig. 2.
Observations (left panel) and simulation (right panel) from the CHIMERE model for
August 8 2003, 14:00 UT. The right panel figure is taken from Vautard et al. (2005). Observations
were taken from several monitorinig networks in Europe
