Software for environmental impact assessment of air pollution dispersion based on ArcGIS

Abstract

Environmental impact assessment (EIA) of air pollution diffusion of different kinds of hazardous sources can provide support information for decision making of emergency plan preparation and approval of new construction project. A GIS-based software was developed as a computer aided tool for EIA of atmospheric pollution dispersion. The industrial source complex (ISC3) dispersion models developed by US Environmental Protection Agency were used for calculation of the ground-level concentrations for point, area, flare and volume sources. The Fortran code named SCREEN3 was integrated to implement ISC3 models. Hybrid programing technology of C# and Fortran was used to develop the software. ArcGIS was used as GIS platform to represent the pollutant concentration with contour visualization on a map. The developed software can be used as a tool for air pollution assessment with preliminary estimation scheme (screening scheme). © 2011 Published by Elsevier Ltd.