Evaluation of OSPM against air quality measurements in Brazil – the case study of Fortaleza, Ceará

Abstract

The contribution of vehicle emissions to air pollution is considered a large environmental and health problem in big Brazilian cities caused, among others, by slow renewal of the old vehicle fleet. Brazilian studies usually only consider traffic-related issues in transportation analysis, with minor assessments of emissions and close to non-existent assessment of air quality. On this background, this research aimed to calibrate and evaluate the Operational Street Pollution Model (OSPM ® ) to Brazilian conditions by implementing Brazilian emission factors. The urban background concentrations were modelled with the Urban Background Model (UBM) as part of the air quality system (THOR -AirPAS). In this case, we used meteorological data from a ground meteorological station outside Fortaleza processed by meteorological pre-processor and regional background concentrations from the Integrated Forecast System (IFS) as input to UBM.New air quality measurements were collected in busy streets of the city of Fortaleza during the year of 2017. The study collected samples of daily NO2 and PM10 concentrations to evaluate OSPM daily estimations. In addition, a transportation travel demand model (TRANUS) has been calibrated to the case study area with observed traffic data collected, in order to provide Annual Average Daily Traffic (AADT) as inputs to OSPM ® . Two sets of emission factors were evaluated. Official Brazilian emission factors were applied to OSPM ® , as well as adjusted emission factors derived in the project based on calibration that were higher than the official emission factors. Data showed that concentrations are significantly influenced by meteorological factors (such as temperature, wind speeds, wind directions), and especially precipitation for PM10 concentrations. OSPM ® simulated results showed concentration levels and patterns close to air quality measurements with default emission factors and calibrated emission for UBM but large underestimations if official emissions were used for both UBM and OSPM.

Assessment of the environmental quality of areas used for sport and leisure in a city undergoing an accelerated urbanization process (Fortaleza, Brazil)

“…In recent times cities are undergoing severe transformations in which areas for sport and leisure are increasingly being suppressed, and so people are using areas with low environmental quality for physical activities, or even streets with high tra c (Rocha et al 2016;Marques et al, 2019;Dias et al, 2020;Bertoncini et al, 2021). According to Cajazeiras et al (2022), bacteria represented from 76% to 91% of the suspended microbiota in three outdoor areas used for physical activity, speci cally Genus Bacillus was the main representative of Gram positive and Enterobacter genus the most frequently identi ed among Gram-negative, while Aspergillus and Penicillium genera were the dominant among fungi.…”

Which is better? Business models of partial and cross ownership in an NEV supply chain

“…Among them, the air pollution caused by automobile exhaust is more detrimental to human health (F abio et al, 2021;Pathak et al, 2021). Studies have shown that transportation has become the fastest growing sector of global energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions, among which fuel vehicles are one of the significant reasons for the rise of carbon emissions and air pollution (Zhang et al, 2020;Dias et al, 2021;Makar et al, 2021). Very recently, new energy vehicles (NEVs) using clean energy can lessen carbon emissions to a certain extent, effectively decrease atmospheric pollution and promote sustainable energy consumption (Zheng et al, 2020;Zhao et al, 2021).…”