Exposure Risks from Pollutants in Domestic Environments: The Urban Exposure Project

Abstract

The Urban Exposure Project is an EU funded project to produce a state of the art, user-friendly management decision software tool for administrators to help them quantify and deal with the real health risks associated with pollution in urban environments. The project, which began in December 2002 will run for 3 years and will quantify the relationship between outdoor pollution measurements and actual exposure suffered by people in urban indoor environments. The resulting product will be extensively field tested in 2 European urban centres before being made available to administrators. This paper gives an overview of the project and a summary of its achievements at the end of its first year.

Assessment of Pollutant Dispersion in the Re-entrance Space of a High-rise Residential Building, Using Wind Tunnel Simulations

“…Investigations of indoor air pollutant transport and dispersion around a naturally ventilated building are critical for studying the indoor air pollutant dispersion mechanism. The understanding of the dispersion mechanism would thereby enable architects and building managers to minimise the harmful transmission of pollutants that could have an impact on the indoor air quality for the residents [1][2][3][4][5]. The outbreak of SARS [6,7], bird flu [8] and A(H1N1) influenza [9] have increased the attention to the issue, particularly in the high density communities of Hong Kong and other countries in the Far East [10][11][12][13][14].…”

“…The assessment of the airborne pollutant movement and dispersion can be performed by theoretical analytical method or numerical simulations [21][22][23] combined with on-site field full-scale measurements [24,25] and/or wind tunnel experiments [26,27]. These approaches are used to predict the dispersion of indoor air pollutants within and around a built-up environment in various meteorological conditions with different wind speeds and directions [1][2][3][6][7][8]21,22,[26][27][28]. Numerical simulation is often needed to complement with and be validated by on-site full-scale investigation or wind tunnel measurement.…”

Integrated systems for forecasting urban meteorology, air pollution and population exposure

“…The previous experience and corresponding publications suggested some integrated systems: starting from atmospheric dispersion models integrated with population exposure models for environmental assessments (e.g., Coulson et al, 2005) or from meteorological models to atmospheric pollution forecast for urban areas without consideration of the health effects (e.g., Berge et al, 2002;Byun and Ching, 1999). For emergency preparedness modelling there exist integrated systems, which consider NWP model data, accidental contamination and population doses, but they consider mostly regional scale processes and do not include urban features, e.g.…”

Integrated systems for forecasting urban meteorology, air pollution and population exposure

“…The main novel element of this paper is the presentation of an improved type of UAQIFS which integrates all the required forecast steps from emissions and meteorological data to atmospheric pollution and population exposure. The previous experience and corresponding publications suggested some integrated systems: starting from atmospheric dispersion models integrated with population exposure models for environmental assessments (e.g., Coulson et al, 2005) or from meteorological models to atmospheric pollution forecast for urban areas without consideration of the health effects (e.g., Berge et al, 2002;Byun and Ching, 1999). For emergency preparedness modelling there exist integrated systems, which consider NWP model data, accidental contamination and population doses, but they consider mostly regional scale processes and do not include urban features, e.g.…”