A simple model for calculating air pollution within street canyons

Abstract This paper introduces the Semi-Empirical Urban Street (SEUS) model. SEUS is a simple mathematical model based on the scaling of air pollution concentration inside street canyons employing the emission rate, the width of the canyon, the dispersive velocity scale and the background concentration. Dispersive velocity scale depends on turbulent motions related to wind and traffic. The parameterisations of these turbulent motions include two dimensionless empirical parameters. Functional forms of these parameters have been obtained from full scale data measured in street canyons at four European cities. The sensitivity of SEUS model is studied analytically. Results show that relative errors in the evaluation of the two dimensionless empirical parameters have less influence on model uncertainties than uncertainties in other input variables. The model estimates NO 2 concentrations using a simple photochemistry scheme. SEUS is applied to estimate NO x and NO 2 hourly concentrations in an irregular and busy street canyon in the city of Buenos Aires. The statistical evaluation of results shows that there is a good agreement between estimated and observed hourly concentrations (e.g. fractional bias are −10.3% for NO x and +7.8% for NO 2 ). The agreement between the estimated and observed values has also been analysed in terms of its dependence on wind speed and direction. The model shows a better performance for wind speeds >2 m s −1 than for lower wind speeds and for leeward situations than for others. No significant discrepancies have been found between the results of the proposed model and that of a widely used operational dispersion model (OSPM), both using the same input information.