Estudo do impacto das emissões de poluentes na Região Metropolitana de Porto Alegre - RS

Abstract

The emission of pollution from anthropogenic urban sources is a serious public health problem in large cities, which have infrastructure deficiencies caused by rapid population growth combined with the lack of urban planning. Depending on the level at which such pollutants are in the atmosphere, they can produce significant effects in humans, animals and even vegetation. Due to the increase in the rate of urbanization and industrial development over the past decades, there were increases in anthropogenic emissions of ozone precursors in the regions of Brazil highly urbanized and developed. Efforts to control air pollution are being directed to the improvement of air quality in these areas, with the application of control measures and strategies to reduce emissions, using mostly tools like numerical models of atmospheric chemistry and air quality monitoring. In the state of Rio Grande do Sul (RS), the Metropolitan Region of Porto Alegre (RMPA) is one of them. Through various studies, it was concluded that one of the major problems caused by air pollution in urban areas is caused by photochemical oxidants, the main one being the ozone (O3). The surface ozone is formed by a complex series of photochemical reactions between nitrogen oxides (NOX = NO + NO2) and volatile organic compounds (VOCs) in the presence of sunlight. Cars are the main sources of emissions of ozone precursors, not discarding their contribution by stationary and biogenic sources. This work aims at investigating the behavior of the concentrations of surface ozone (O3) surface, nitrogen oxides (NOX), carbon monoxide (CO) and hydrocarbons (HC) in RMPA through numerical simulations performed using the PREP-CHEM -SRC (preprocessor of trace gas and aerosol emission fields for regional and global atmospheric chemistry models) models CCATT-BRAMS (Coupled Chemistry Aerosol and Tracer Transport model to the Brazilian developments on the Regional Atmospheric Modeling System) and WRF / Chem (Weather Research and Forecasting model coupled with Chemistry). The field of modeling is implemented on an area covering the MRPA, emphasizing the anthropogenic (mobile) and biogenic sources. To validate the results, they are compared with concentration data obtained by monitoring the air quality in the RMPA.