A study on atmospheric dispersion around Kalpakkam coastal site using a non-hydrostatic model and comparison with field data

Study of the sea breeze characteristics and Thermal Internal Boundary Layer (TIBL) is very important to understand the dispersion characteristics of air pollutants near coastal area. In the present paper, dispersion characteristics near Kalpakkam coastal area are studied and discussed by simulating sea breeze characteristics and TIBL using a non-hydrostatic mesoscale model in its two dimensional form. The model is run with surface physics, simplified radiation physics and turbulent kinetic energy (TKE) closure scheme for diffusion. A joint meteorological field experiment was carried out by IITM-Pune at Kalpakkam by deploying state of art sensors and tether balloon systems for observing the height profiles of meteorological parameters. The data taken from the field experiment is used here to compare the simulations. Results shows that the onset of sea breeze is one hour before as observed from the field experiment. Slight difference is also seen in wind speed and temperature. Spatial variation of the dispersion pattern could be understood from the simulated TKE profile. From the study, it is shown that the model gives only a over all picture of the real scenario and successful simulations require the inclusion of more atmospheric dynamics such as microphysics, cumulus parameterization and atmospheric radiation. (author)