Impact of Climatic Changes on Pollution Levels

Abstract

The climatic changes are already causing more and more extreme weather events in many different areas of the Earth. One of the most important consequences of these changes, which has different impacts, is the clear trend for global increase of the temperature. This increase has also some influence on the pollution levels, mainly because (a) many of the damaging pollutants participate in chemical reactions which depend strongly on the temperature and (b) the pollution levels depend also on the natural (biogenic) emissions, which in general are increased when the temperature becomes higher. Therefore, some pollution levels, which are not very dangerous at present, could become harmful in the near future. This is why the influence of the climate changes on the pollution levels should be studied carefully. Some results related to the influence of the climatic changes on some critical levels related to ozone concentrations are reported in this chapter. The mathematical tool applied in this investigation is a large-scale air pollution model developed and used to study pollution levels in Europe. The model is described by a system of partial differential equations. The discretization of this system leads to huge computational tasks and it is difficult to handle it even when some of the fastest computers are used. Several difficult tasks must be resolved in the efforts to make the model tractable on the computers available at present. It is necessary to resolve the following four tasks: (A) to apply advanced numerical methods, (B) to introduce some splitting techniques, (C) to parallelize the computational process and (D) to exploit the cache memories efficiently. Some results, which are obtained when the four requirements (A)-(D) are satisfied, are presented and analysed in the chapter. The results show clearly that the climatic changes will lead to some increase of pollution levels, thus these could become dangerous for human beings.