Using meteorological data to model pollutant dispersion in the atmosphere

For environmental analysis as the dispersion of pollutant in the atmosphere it is essential to have meteorological data that are relevant for a long period. In this paper we explore the possibility of using an environmental Test Reference Year (TRY), i.e. a set of real, contemporaneous and hourly meteorological variables, “extracted” from a hourly series of at least 10 years, for modelling pollutant dispersion in the atmosphere. The classical approach, based on a statistical data set, implies the loss of important information such as the real correlation between the different meteorological variables, and this implies crude approximation in the simulations results. We compare the simulations results with the long hourly 10 years data set (which can be considered a 'brute force' approach, since it requires a huge amount of data and time processing, but it is here considered the most severe benchmark) and with the statistical data set commonly used. It is shown that the results obtained using the TRY have a good agreement with the ones obtained with the simulation of the 10 years and they are also much better than those obtained using the statistical data set.