Catálogo de publicaciones - libros

The international instruments in the scope of environmental protection are not successful without taking into account the risk of natural hazards and terrorist attacks and their impact. Disaster reduction policies and measures need to be implemented, to enable societies to be resilient to natural and man-made hazards while ensuring that the development efforts do not increase the vulnerability to these hazards. Disaster reduction is therefore emerging as an important requisite for sustainable development. The need to have accurate tools supporting the development and implementation of adequate risk analysis, management and mitigation approaches, plans, methodologies and strategies give models a unique importance. In this context, the work is focused on some of the efforts made so far in the scope of risk and emergency modelling towards environmental security, at different spatial scales, from the atmosphere to aquatic systems.

Logical schemes as well as constructive aspects of a variational methodology for problems of diagnostics, monitoring, and risk assessment are presented.

Environmental risk and impact assessment and prediction modelling is one of the most important instruments in the environmental security management and preparedness, and it needs further development in the quickly changing world and society. Most of the previous studies in this field considered, as a rule, only separate aspects of the risk and impact assessments. New realities and problems in the environmental security, supercomputer facilities, request a new generation of the assessments and prediction tools for the risk and impact assessments. Some new trends, advantages and perspectives in the risk and impact assessment and forecasting methodology (including the integrated and multidisciplinary approaches, health and combined effects of different risk and impact factors, source-receptor, sensitivity and vulnerability problems, and meteorological advances for urban air quality forecasting and assessments) are discussed in the paper.

Two environmental protection problems are considered. The first one is related to control theory and optimization focusing on minimization of damage to the environment, and the second one is concerning numerical modelling of the dynamics and transformation of atmospheric gaseous pollutants and aerosols. The wind field and turbulence parameters are calculated from a 3D mesoscale hydrodynamic model.

Different programmes related to air quality risk management and emergency situations are currently in operation at European level. Intensive research is currently in operation related to integration of air quality and air quality and meteorological observational networks to provide efficient, robust and confident air quality forecasts for emergency and risk assessment situations. Different EU programmes are currently ongoing with several objectives into such integration. The GMES programme is focusing on Global Monitoring for Environment and Security. This programme is supported by European Space Agency and EU Commission (FP6 EU Programme). Also a specific programme supported by EU into the 6th Framework Programme and in the area of Information Technologies is supporting several projects focusing on Risk & Management on Environmental Issues. In this contribution we will show the results of integration of new telecommunication technologies (mobile technologies, SMS, GPRS, 3G-UMTS, WAP, etc.) to produce integrated air quality services for the citizen and also for environmental authorities. In this

The impact pathway methodology integrates the input of different scientific disciplines within a consistent calculation framework as developed in the ExternE community. In this contribution, the methodology is used to evaluate the impact of two different land use development scenarios in terms of traffic flows, air quality, human exposure to air pollution and associated external costs. In the uncontrolled ‘urban-sprawl’ scenario, the urbanized area increases by almost 75%. For the ‘satellitecity’ scenario, where the urban development is controlled and directed to 5 five existing towns, the urban land use changes are increasing with 9%. A detailed analysis shows that the urban-sprawl scenario results in an exposure reduction of 5.7% due the movement of people from locations with high concentrations of particulate matter to locations with lower particulate matter concentrations. A reduction of 1.4% was found for the satellite-city scenario. The dominant driver of these exposure changes appears to be the population moving from the relatively polluted conurbation to less-polluted areas.

A large number of risks, with which society is confronted at present and will even more be exposed to in the course of future industrial development and growth of agricultural activity due to increasing population worldwide, is caused by anthropogenic emissions of primary air pollutants and precursors of secondary ones. Numerical model systems simulating chemistry and transport of minor constituents in the atmosphere have been developed which have mainly been used for air quality analysis in the past and are now more and more converted to forecast tools for the atmospheric environment. Such air quality (AQ) models have the potential to be applied with fast response to emergency cases like chemical or power plant accidents. Comprehensive assessment of risks and possible impacts can be carried out and used for mitigation or prevention of hazardous impacts. Requirements for the design of advanced AQ models for the treatment of such problems are discussed and some examples demonstrating the spectrum of possible applications are presented. Necessary steps for future improvements of model design and performance are briefly mentioned.

After the September 11th, 2001, it has become clear that a new type of event can also trigger the need for rapid response and exposure, environmental and human health impact analysis. The use of specific numerical tools, such as computational fluid dynamic (CFD) models, combined with exposure studies can contribute to the simulation of the effect of a terrorist attack on local air quality and on human health, in an urban area. The main objective of this study is the development of an exposure module to chemical agents and its integration in the CFD model VADIS, in order to estimate the cumulative exposure and the number of persons exposed above specific limit values of Sulphur Mustard HD agent. The improved numerical model was applied to a selected case study in the Lisbon urban area, in order to determine the effects on the population, as a result of a terrorist attack scenario with chemical agent Sulphur Mustard HD. The number of inhabitants exposed to HD agent concentrations above 100 mg.min.m, capable of causing the first noticeable effects, above the medium incapacitating dosage (ICt50) of

This paper presents the application of TCAM model to assess secondary pollution control policies. The work focuses on two emission scenarios: the current legislation one, related to the emission reduction established by the EU Directives, and the MFR one, referring to the emission reduction caused by the use of the most efficient available reduction technology for each emission sector. The results show that the impact of both scenarios on ozone mean concentration is limited, even as for AOT40, the reduction reaches the 50% with respect to the base case. The impact on PM10 is more significant, also in terms of mean and exceedance days. Therefore, the impact of both emission control strategies does not meet PM10 EU 2010 standards over the whole domain.

The main aim of this pilot study was an evaluation, from a probabilistic point of view, of possible temporal and spatial distribution of deposition patterns due to atmospheric transport from three smelters of the Kola Peninsula (Russia). These patterns with GIS integration can be used further for the estimation of possible short- and long-term consequences resulting from sources of continuous emissions for the environment and population on regional and Northern Hemispheric scales.