ABSTRACT
Urban air quality management describes the process by which policy makers set about improving the quality of life in urban environments by reducing the impacts of air pollution on human health. The main function of an urban air quality model is to convert an emission inventory into a time series of air quality concentrations at a number of locations. Urban air quality models aim to describe accurately, and without bias, how pollutant emissions from each source and sector within the inventory influence the spatial distribution of the ground level concentrations of that pollutant, downwind of each source. Gaussian plume models are based on simple solutions of the diffusion equation and are widely used to describe the dispersion and advection of primary pollutants away from single or multiple pollution sources. Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) models also solve the fluid dynamic equations implicit in the detailed description of the transport of air pollutants over the urban environment.
