Base module air pollution Working on air pollution needs much more than a sophisticated calculation model: Input data must be assessed, adjusted, corrected or modified and finally documented. The calculation must be directed and controlled most efficiently. Results must be visualized in a flexible way to grant an effective control. High quality result presentation layouts and individual templates for further use must be achievable without consuming a big part of your project budget. The Base Module Air Pollution grants for our calculation modules exactly this highly developed project environment as standard for each SoundPLAN air pollution user.

Base Module Air Pollution General aspects Sharing noise and air pollution projects Until Version 7.2 SoundPLAN acoustics and SoundPLAN air were available with one program call to highlight the compatibility of the projects. However, this concept had several disadvantages:  Air pollution calculations often blocked the computer for several days. Noise projects were set in a waiting loop for this time.  The online help was available only with noise project examples and for a user without noise experience it was sometimes hard to find sensible information for an air pollution project.

to a noise start kit had not the control comfort of cartography and 3D, which proofs necessary to avoid grave errors. With Version 7.3, still the same program kernel is shared, but the license is split. That means you get a license containing your start kit noise and the selected supplementary modules and another license for your start kit air pollution and the calculation models you ordered.

 Noise and air pollution projects have different requirements on the availability of SoundPLAN features for beginners. An air pollution module added

You can still run both licenses with one program installation on the same computer as standalone version, being asked during the program start, which license you want to use. Also you can access any project with both licenses, depending on what you want to do, but that's not recommended to avoid damages.

However, mostly it is more sensible to create the noise model and then handle noise and air on different project copies, (or the other way round) because air pollution often requires modifications and simplifi-

cations of the model to get sensible results in an appropriate calculation time. Best you install SoundPLAN on several computers to be able to use both licenses at the same time.

The base module Air Pollution always includes the former single modules Cartography and 3D Graphics to have an optimized model control. Additionally each calculation model comes along with different control

tools in the calculation kernel interface, adjusted to the control capabilities of each calculation model. Also we have special libraries with sophisticated tools to analyze, modify and present input data.

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Base Module Air Pollution Meteorological Station Library: Wind flow data What's the sense of a library for meteorological data? Shouldn't meteo data be measured locally? Of course, they should, but you will quickly understand the sensibility to store copies of a measurement row with several classification settings for different model approaches, different treatment of calms, different approaches to fill data leaks. Maybe you need

also selections of data filtered by daytime or by seasons and so on. We offer a library to create and save all those variations. If you work often in the same area, you can also store those library elements globally to use them in further projects.

This Library is a mighty tool! It helps to analyze data, to find data lacks, to control if data fit to your project area, to deal with calms and circulating winds, to adjust raw data and to derive information like stability classes from several measured parameters, using different stability class approaches. Whenever your data have any insufficiency, this library assists you with several types of diagrams to visualize what your problem is and to communicate it to your customer in order to get better data or to show the risk of using bad data. The possibility to match wind roses and pollutant roses with site maps and georeferenced aerial photos is helpful to clear up the last doubts according to your concern.

If your data are ok, you can spice up your report with those diagrams to make your work transparent and comprehensible.

A wind rose placed in an aerial photo upon the source location, shows how obstacles influence the wind distribution. It can sometimes replace a whole expert study if it clearly shows that e.g. the neighbors of a smell source are outside of critical wind directions. Creating separate wind roses for the stability classes or filtering the wind roses by time slices also shows much information. Storing those diagrams as georeferenced bitmaps and loading them as overlay for a 3D view of the terrain model, you will quickly realize which terrain effects are well shown by the wind rose and which seem to be covered by the land use around the measurement station.

All diagrams can be exported to your report as scalable Enhanced Meta Files (*.EMF) via clipboard. Wind roses can also be stored as geo referenced bitmap with user defined size in meters to include them in maps, 3d terrain views or aerial photos to analyze, if the measurement is influenced by obstacles and if it reproduces terrain effects as expected.

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Base Module Air Pollution Meteorological Station Library: Background pollution measurement Background measurement is mostly made in locations representative for purpose of a monitoring of changes. Often everybody knows that the measured values are too high to support sensibly a dispersion calculation with a background value. Of course, you are "on the safe side", if the concentration limits are not exceeded despite of an overestimated background - but if they are exceeded: How can you seriously convince people that you do not only cosmetically reduce the background concentration to hold the limit? If measurement is based on hourly values, you can load the background concentration data together with the meteorological data to the Meteorological Station Library to prepare a detailed analysis. What can be done if the measured background value is too high for your calculation area? Here also the Library "Meteorological Station" has answers: Pollutant rose diagrams show the mean concentration for each wind direction and give an idea, which directions can be representative and which are too much influenced by local sources. The display of percentiles and cutoff of percentiles help to identify and exclude local sources. The display of NO and NO2 in one rose also gives much information about the type of source. Other diagrams display day histograms of the mean concentrations for selected wind direction sectors: They can be created for one or two pollutants at a time, to show e.g. how the relation between NO and NO2 varies during the day. Also mean and percentile wind speeds are displayed to avoid misinterpretations. Using additionally the filters of the Meteorological Station Library to regard seasonal variations, you have a mighty tool to explain, why you can't accept the background value and how much you can decrease it sensibly for your project.

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Base Module Air Pollution Histogram Libraries (day, week, year) Hourly resolved histograms are useful for several purposes. They can be used to define daily emissions over 24 hours as well as to define seasonal emission variations or, for AUSTAL2000, to define time variable buoyant plume rise.

tween 1 and 365 days. To each period you assign a week histogram and to each week histogram you assign 1-7 day histograms. You can also use factors to adjust weekdays and for each defined period of a year to simplify the procedure. Assigning such a year histogram to a source, the defined emission mass distribution is normalized and adjusted to the individual average emission of each source object. If emissions have to be defined non-cyclic, e.g. like wind erosion sources, you can alternatively enter a list with values externally calculated for each hour. Thinking about emission time histograms please regard that the use of emission histograms is not always supported and will be sometimes automatically replaced by a constant mean emission value:

The concept is made to support as well simple emission cycles as complex cycles with seasonal variations. The year can be divided to freely chosen periods be-

E.g. if you enter the emission time histogram but calculate with classified meteo data, there is no hourly meteo information to be combined with emissions.

Cartography & 3D Air pollution projects often contain lots of maps – not only for presentation but also to control plausibility of results and modeling and to display several aspects of the results. We decided to include the cartography module to the Base Module Air Pollution, because it contains many features which help you to manage this task in an appropriate time, e.g. by transposing layouts, view ports, file lists etc. from map to map or map sheet to map sheet. Text variables relating to the loaded data help to ensure that the maps show what they should and 3D views help to find model errors or to understand the wind flow and pollutant dispersion. To support outstanding presentation graphics, quickly stored and loaded as templates, you have lots of possibilities to create symbols, file them on line objects or arrange them as fill pattern for area shape objects. Store them as global object types to have them available for all projects.

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