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Transport of air pollutants over the Indian Region

5. Previous Related Work

The recently completed project sponsored by USAID/India estimated emissions of GHGs and other pollutants from energy activities in India. Yearly and daily CO₂, SO₂, NO, soot, and particulate matter including suspended particulate matter (SPM) emissions from coal burning thermal power plants and vehicular transport in India are calculated. Results and the procedures are available at the URL: www.osc.edu/pcrm/emissions.

6. Methodology

For this effort, an extended region that covers the Indian sub-continent from Afghanistan in the west to parts of Southeast Asian countries in the east, parts of China in the north, and Sri Lanka in the south is being considered. An extended region, 60º east (longitude) for the west boundary, 105º east (longitude) for the east boundary, 0º (latitude) for the southern boundary, and 45º north (latitude) for the north boundary is considered to avoid the contamination owing to boundaries close to the area of interest. The study will use the data assimilation⁴ technique to enter the measurement data into the forecast fields from the model so as to estimate the concentrations over the region. MM5⁵ software will be used to obtain the meteorological data over the gridded region. A chemical transport model HANK⁶ , designed to simulate tropospheric chemistry (troposphere is the lower atmosphere, closest to the earth’s surface) and transport on regional to hemispheric scales will then be utilized to compute the chemical species concentration over the entire Indian region. MOZART software also provides the distribution of several long-lived chemical species (O₃, NO_x, CO, CH₄ etc.) above 60 mbar (or approximately 20 km altitude). There are several other software to calculate chemical species concentrations in the lower atmosphere.

⁴The mathematical basis of data assimilation is estimation or inverse problem theory. Albert Tarantola, [Inverse Problem Theory - Methods for Data Fitting and Model Parameter Estimation, 1987] defines data assimilation in this quotation:
"Humans were naked worms; yet they had an internal model of the world. In the course of time up to the present, this model has been updated many times, following the development of new experimental possibilities or the development of their intellect. Sometimes the updating has been only quantitative, sometimes it has been qualitative. Inverse problem theory tries to describe the rules human beings should use for quantitative updating”.

William Menke [Geophysical Data Analysis: Discrete Inverse Theory, 1984] defines the inverse theory; Inverse theory is an organized set of mathematical techniques for reducing data to obtain useful information about the physical world on the basis of inferences drawn from observations.

⁵Pennsylvania State/National Center for Atmospheric Research (PSU/NCAR) Mesoscale Modeling system
⁶HANK is a Regional Chemical Transport Model, designed to simulate tropospheric chemistry and transport on regional to hemispheric scales. HANK also has a data assimilation component. HANK calculates transport of 49 chemical species with 145 reactions, including 28 photolysis reactions.