Air Pollution Modeling and Chemistry
102-0377-00L, 3 credits, autumn Semester
Lecturers: S. Henne, S. Reimann and X. Zhang
1. Abstract
Air pollutants cause negative effects on humans, wildlife and buildings. To control and reduce the impact of air pollutants, their transfer from sources to receptors needs to be known. This transfer includes transport within the atmospheric boundary layer, chemical transformation reactions and phase-transfer processes from air to liquid and solid materials (aerosols, water, ...).
2. Objective
The students understand the fundamental principles of atmospheric transport, dispersion and chemistry of pollutants on the local to regional scale and their transfer between air and condensed phases (aerosols, water, solids). This includes the knowledge of important atmospheric reactions, sources and sinks. The obtained understanding enables the students to apply computational tools to predict the transport and transformation of chemicals at the local to regional scale.
3. Contents
- Structure of the Atmosphere
- Thermodynamics of the atmosphere
- Atmospheric stability classes
- Atmospheric turbulence
- Dispersion in the atmospheric boundary layer
- Numerical models of atmospheric dispersion
- Gas phase reaction kinetics
- Tropospheric chemistry
- Surface deposition of air pollutants
- Chemistry box models
- Volatile organic pollutants (VOCs) and semi-volatile organic pollutants (SVOCs)
- Distribution of chemicals between different phases
- Kinetics of phase transfer processes
- Computational tools to estimate volatility, distribution and phase transfer rates of organic chemicals
4. Literature
The literature of the course will cover:
- Atmospheric chemistry
- Environmental organic chemistry and mass transfer
- Atmospheric dynamics and boundary layer
- Atmospheric modelling
- Introduction to R
Lists of suitable books and papers will be provided in the lecture.