Comprehensive air pollution studies with the Unified Danish Eulerian Model

Abstract

Air pollution, especially the reduction of the air pollution to some acceptable levels, is a highly relevant environmental problem, which is becoming more and more important. This problem can successfully be studied only when high-resolution comprehensive mathematical models are developed and used on a routinely basis. However, such models are very time-consuming, even when modern high-speed computers are available. The models need a great amount of input data (meteorological, chemical and emission data). Furthermore, the models are producing huge files of output data, which have to be stored for future uses (for visualization and animation of the results). Finally, huge sets of measurement data (normally taken at many stations located in different countries) have to be used in the efforts to validate the model results. The necessity to handle efficiently large-scale air pollution models in order to be able to resolves a series of important environmental tasks is discussed in this paper. The need for parallel runs is emphasized. The particular model used is the Unified Danish Eulerian Model (UNI-DEM), but most of the results can also be applied when other large-scale models are used. The use of UNI-DEM in some comprehensive air pollution studies is discussed in the end of the paper.