Budget analysis for reactive plume transport over idealised urban areas

Abstract

Pedestrian-level air quality in urban areas is largely affected by the pollutants emitted from street canyons to the atmospheric boundary layer (ABL). Most vehicular exhausts are chemically reactive that evolve to their secondary counterparts. Besides, building roughness modifies the flows, which, in turn, influences the chemical reactions in the ABL. The ABL pollutant transport is affected by advection, diffusion, and chemical reactions. The roles of individual terms and their collective effect on the overall ABL pollutant transport are not yet clear. In this study, turbulent dispersion of reactive pollutants in the ABL over hypothetical urban area in the form of an array of idealised street canyons is investigated using large-eddy simulation. Nitric oxide (NO) is emitted from the ground level of the first street canyon into the urban ABL doped with ozone (O3). Budget analysis of the transport processes is conducted. It is found that the contributions from advection, diffusion, and chemistry vary in the streamwise direction and they couple closely with each other. For inert pollutants, streamwise advection and vertical diffusion mainly counterbalance each other. For chemically reactive pollutants, on the other hand, chemistry plays a key role in the far field where the mixing of pollutant species is rather uniform. In view of the elevated shear stress at the roof level, advection, diffusion, and chemistry show abrupt changes, complicating the pollutant dispersion processes.