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WIND TUNNEL SIMULATION OF FLOW AND POLLUTANT DISPERSAL AROUND THE WORLD TRADE CENTER SITE
Citation:
PERRY, S. G., D. HEIST, R. S. THOMPSON, W. H. SNYDER, AND R. E. LAWSON. WIND TUNNEL SIMULATION OF FLOW AND POLLUTANT DISPERSAL AROUND THE WORLD TRADE CENTER SITE. EM: AIR AND WASTE MANAGEMENT ASSOCIATION'S MAGAZINE FOR ENVIRONMENTAL MANAGERS. Air & Waste Management Association, Pittsburgh, PA, , 31-34, (2004).
Impact/Purpose:
The scientific modeling expertise of NERL/AMD technical staff often results in requests for staff to provide timely support and advice to EPA Management in the event of a national emergency and to perform the research on model development and evaluation in support of the development of early response models. Flow and dispersion in urban areas is extremely complex and not well characterized in spite of their importance to homeland security and emergency response applications. Specifically, understanding the transport and fate of pollutants in urban canopies is critical for implementing air quality standards, performing risk assessments, developing environmental management strategies, supporting human exposure and health effects studies. Recently, though, much focus has been placed on supporting the development of homeland security tools needed to prepare for and respond to malicious attacks with toxic chemicals. Toward this goal, laboratory studies have been conducted in EPA's Meteorological Wind Tunnel for idealized urban settings, for very complex settings such as lower Manhattan surrounding the World Trade Center (WTC) site, and for very building specific cases such as the Pentagon. Continued studies in a variety of urban morphologies and release scenarios are needed to support a more thorough understanding of urban dispersion and the development of refined numerical modeling approaches.
Description:
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) mission to protect human health and the environment has also been directed to include homeland security (i.e., to emphasize and expand its expertise and capability to prevent, where possible, and to detect and respond to, where necessary, accidental and intentional releases of toxic substances into the environment). Since numerical simulation models are important tools for assessing and responding to these types of releases, there is an ongoing need for both field and laboratory studies for model-development and model-evaluation purposes.
