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The Role of Fronts on the Vertical Transport of Atmospheric Pollutants II: Vertical transport experiment using MM5  

Nam, Jae-Cheol (Applied Meteorology Research Lab., Meteorological Research Institute/KMA)
Hwang, Seung-On (Numerical Weather Forecast Division, Korea Meteorological Administration)
Park, Soon-Ung (School of Earth and Environmental Science, Seoul National University)
Publication Information
Atmosphere / v.14, no.4, 2004 , pp. 3-18 More about this Journal
Abstract
Neglecting the vertical transport from the surface, most of the previous studies on the long-range transport of pollutants have only considered the horizontal transport caused by the free atmosphere wind. I used a three dimensional numerical model, MM5 (The fifth generation Penn State Univ./NCAR Mesoscale Model) for the simulation of vertical transport of pollutants and investigated the mechanism of the vertical transport of atmospheric pollutants between planetary boundary layer(PBL) and free atmosphere by fronts. From the three dimensional simulation of MM5, the amount of pollutants transport from PBL to free atmosphere is 48% within 18 hour after the development of front, 55% within 24 hour, and 53% within 30 hour. The ratios of the vertically transported pollutant for different seasons are 62%, 60%, 54%, and 43% for spring, summer, fall, and winter, respectively. The most active areas for the vertical transport are the center of low pressure and the warm sector located east side of cold front, in which the strong upward motion slanted northward occurs. The horizontal advection of pollutants at the upper level is stronger than at the lower level simply because of the stronger wind speed. The simulation results shows the well known plum shape distribution of pollutants. The high concentration area is located in the center and north of the low pressure system, while the second highest concentration area is in the warm sector. It is shown that the most important mechanism for the vertical transport is vertical advection, while the vertical diffusion process plays an important role in the redistribution of pollutants in the PBL.
Keywords
atmospheric pollutants; vertical transport; front; advection; diffusion; planetary boundary layer(PBL); MM5;
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