Trends of air pollution in Denmark - Normalised by a simple weather index model

This report is a part of the Traffic Pool projects on 'Traffic and Environments', 1995-99, financed by the Danish Ministry of Transport. The Traffic Pool projects included five different projects on 'Surveillance of the Air Quality', 'Atmospheric Modelling', 'Atmospheric Chemistry Modelling', 'Smog and ozone' and 'Greenhouse effects and Climate', [Rasmussen, 2000]. This work is a part of the project on 'Surveillance of the Air Quality' with the main objectives to make trend analysis of levels of air pollution from traffic in Denmark. Other participants were from the Road Directory mainly focusing on measurement of traffic and trend analysis of the air quality utilising a nordic model for the air pollution in street canyons called BLB (Beregningsmodel for Luftkvalitet i Byluftgader) [Vejdirektoratet 2000], National Environmental Research Institute (HERI) mainly focusing on. measurements of air pollution and trend analysis with the Operational Street Pollution Model (OSPM) [DMU 2000], and the Copenhagen Environmental Protection Agency mainly focusing on measurements. In this study a more simple statistical model has been developed for trend analysis of the air quality. The model is filtering out the influence of the variations from year to year in the meteorological conditions on the air pollution levels. The weather factors found most important are wind speed, wind direction and mixing height. Measurements of CO, NO and NO2 from three streets in Copenhagen have been used, these streets are Jagtvej, Bredgade and H. C. Andersen's Boulevard (HCAB). The years 1994-1996 were used for evaluation of the method and annual indexes of air pollution index dependent only on meteorological parameters, called WEATHIX, were calculated for the years 1990-1997 and used for normalisation of the observed air pollution trends. Meteorological data were taken from either the background stations at the H.C. Oersted - building situated close to one of the street stations or the synoptic station at Kastrup Airport just outside Copenhagen. The mixing height was calculated using a bulk Richardson method on vertical profiles provided by the Numerical Weather Prediction model DMI-HIRLAM (Danish Meteorological Institute - High Resolution Limited Area Model). The model in general gives a good explanation of variations from year to year in the air quality. (au)