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USING THE QUIC MODEL (QUICK URBAN AND INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX) TO STUDY AIR FLOW AND DISPERSION PATTERNS IN DESERTS
Citation:
BOWKER, G. E., D. GILLETTE, D. HEIST, AND S. G. PERRY. USING THE QUIC MODEL (QUICK URBAN AND INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX) TO STUDY AIR FLOW AND DISPERSION PATTERNS IN DESERTS. Presented at Interagency Nuclear Safety Review Panel (INSRP) , Cape Canaveral AFS, FL, March 22 - 24, 2005.
Impact/Purpose:
The objective of this task is to develop and evaluate numerical and physical modeling tools for simulating ground-level concentrations of airborne substances in urban settings at spatial scales ranging from ~1-10 km. These tools will support client needs in the areas of air toxics and homeland security. The air toxics tools will benefit the National Air Toxics Assessment (NATA) program and human exposure modeling needs within EPA. The homeland security-related portion of this task will help in developing tools to assess the threat posed by the release of airborne agents. Both sets of tools will consider the effects induced by urban morphology on fine-scale concentration distributions.
Description:
As part of its continuing development and evaluation, the QUIC model (Quick Urban & Industrial Complex) was used to study flow and dispersion in complex terrain for two cases. First, for a small area of lower Manhattan near the World Trade Center site, comparisons were made between measurements taken around a model in a wind tunnel and a QUIC simulation. Second, for a small desert area in the Jornada Experimental Range in New Mexico, wind velocity comparisons were made between measurements taken in the field and QUIC simulations. For both cases, comparisons were favorable, with QUIC correctly identifying the overall flow patterns and often matching wind velocities.