Transactions on Ecology and the Environment vol 13, © 1997 WIT Press, www.witpress.com, ISSN 1743-3541 Development of an Automatic System for Control and Prevention of Air Pollution in Huelva (Spain). F. Martin, I. Palomino, C. Gorostiza, C. Gonzalez, A. Bailador, E. Sanchez, M. Palacios and S. Nunez. Centra de Investigaciones Energeticas Medioambientales y Tecnologicas. (CIEMAT). Avda. Complutense 22, 28040 Madrid, Spain. Abstract An automatic system for control of the air pollution in the industrialised area of Huelva is being developed by the Environment Institute and the Technology Directorate of CIEMAT which has been contracted by the Environment Agency of the Government of Andalucia. This system is called SIC AH (which is the acronym of Sistema Informatico para el Control y la Prevencion de la Contamination Atmosferica en Huelva). Huelva is a heavily industrialised (chemical industries, refineries, etc) coastal area located in the Southwest of Spain. SICAH is an application that runs under Windows 95/NT operative system. Its kernel has been built in C++ , that integrates a geographic representation system and runs Fortran numerical scientific codes. SICAH has been designed to receive and process automatically in real-time the information (which are in a ORACLE database) of the air quality, emission and meteorological network in the industrial area of Huelva and provide predictions of the concentrations of SC^, STP, TRS and CO for several hours ahead. The core of SICAH is a mesoscale Lagrangian puff dispersion model which also deals with the pollutant deposition. Transactions on Ecology and the Environment vol 13, © 1997 WIT Press, www.witpress.com, ISSN 1743-3541 152 Measurements and Modelling in Environmental Pollution 1 Introduction About 15 years ago, the evaluation systems of the pollution produced by large pollutant emission sources in real time were fundamentally restricted to the use of computers to replace the existing manual calculations of atmospheric dispersion, dose estimate, etc. Now it exists a trend to most complete systems which consider analysis of the status of the pollutant sources, effect or damage evaluation, acquisition and managing of environmental monitor data, socio- economic factors, etc. Obviously, the user can not be an expert in each and every one of these fields. The trend is that the user becomes a pilot of a computerised evaluation centre, responsible for the technical operation, for the data managing and for the information emission and transfer. This evolution must be reflected in a system that must be increasingly self-sufficient, that is, it must operate with a limited need of intervention of the experts. Generally the computerised systems used to assisting in the decisionmaking in relationship to the atmospheric pollution to local scale cover many possibilities. They range from the systems of control which solely they are capable from receiving, storing and, eventually to present the information (wind data, emission and air quality) to the prevention systems which determine the concentration fields in the area, predict their evolution in the following hours, link these concentrations with the effects on the population and recommend measures to mitigate them. Although there are meaningful differences between the various prevention systems that appear in the specialised bibliography (Baverstam [1], Cremades [2], Ceima et al. [3] among others), their principal components have much common features, according to Gudiksen [4] these features can be summarised in the following: a) a set of atmospheric dispersion codes that use local and regional measures to predict the temporary and spatial evolution of the pollutants in the local; b) a monitor network transmitting the data to an installation centralised for the subsequent analysis and c) a methodology that determines the suitable responses to each situation with the purpose of impact mitigation. In this paper, the development of SICAH which is an automatic system for control and prevention of air pollution in Huelva (Spain) is described. 2 Description of the environmental monitoring network in the Huelva area SICAH has been developed to be installed and operated in the Centre of Environmental Information and Decision (CIDMA, which is acronym of Centro de Information y Decision MedioAmbiental) of Environmental Council of Andalucia. Transactions on Ecology and the Environment vol 13, © 1997 WIT Press, www.witpress.com, ISSN 1743-3541 Measurements and Modelling in Environmental Pollution 153 ATLANTIC OCEAN Figure 1. Map of Huelva Province and the domain of SICAH. CIDMA is the place where all the information coming from the network monitoring pollutant inmission and emission and meteorology in a region extended 30 Km around the Huelva city is received. Huelva is a highly industrialised area located in the South Atlantic coast of Spain (see Figure 1). The main industries are devoted to the chemical production ranging from fine chemical production to petrol refineries. Other important sources of pollutants are the Cristobal Colon power plant and concrete and cellulose industries along with the road traffic. The more important roads are the highway (A-49) in the eastern area, the roads around the Huelva city and the road N-431 in the western area (see Figure 2). The terrain in the region is mainly flat with small hills in the coast and it becomes hilly inland in the north. Figure 2 also shows the topography corresponding to the domain for SICAH computations. It is a 60x60 Krn^ area covering all the industrial sources and the air quality and meteorological stations. The highest elevations is 298 m ASL. The land use mostly shurbland with areas of marshland close to the Huelva city (west, south and east) and forest (mainly pine and eucalyptus) and crops areas. The Atlantic Ocean covers the southern area of the domain. The pollution monitoring network consists of 14 stations (see Figure 2) where the air concentration of pollutants is measured continuously and every 15 minutes the information is sent automatically by radio to the Control Centre in CIDMA. CIDMA records the 15 minute-averaged concentrations of every pollutant. The pollutants measured in every station is showed in the Table 1. Transactions on Ecology and the Environment vol 13, © 1997 WIT Press, www.witpress.com, ISSN 1743-3541 154 Measurements and Modelling in Environmental Pollution MAP OF THE SICAH DOMAIN * POINT SOURCES FOR THE POLLLJTANT EMISSION FROM ROAD TRAFFIC • INDUSTRIAL POINT SOURCES QAIR QUALITY STATIONS 0 mASL 134 138 142 146 150 154 158 162 166 170 174 178 ' 182 186 190 W-E(KmUTM) Figure 2. Map of the SICAH domain showing main roads, air quality network and major emission sources. STATION CODE MOfSTORED POLLUTAPITS Pozo Dulce 12 SOz, STP, NOx,03, CO, HC,SH2 Barriada de La Orden 2 SO;, STP, NOx,SH2 Punta Umbria 3 SO;, STP, NOx,HC Niebla 4 SO;, STP, NOx La Rabida 5 so,, STP, NOx Palos de la Frontera 6 so,, STP, NOx,SH, San Juan del Puerto 7 SO,, STP, NOx,TRS Moguer 8 SO?, STP, NOx,TRS Estadio 9 so,, STP, NOx,CO, HC, SH2 Los Resales 10 so,, STP, NOx,CO Marisma del Titan 11 so,, STP, NOx, CO Romeralejo 14 so?, STP Torre Arenillas 13 SO,, STP, NOx Manuel Lois 991 so?, STP, NOx,0; Table 1. Stations of the pollution monitoring network. Two stations (Barriada de La Orden and La Rabida) have also meteorological sensors for measuring wind speed and direction, pressure, temperature, humidity, rainfall, and solar radiation. The data are recorded every 15 minutes. Wind data are measured at 3.5 m AGL. In addition, a Doppler Sodar is Transactions on Ecology and the Environment vol 13, © 1997 WIT Press, www.witpress.com, ISSN 1743-3541 Measurements and Modelling in Environmental Pollution 155 deployed to monitor wind and thermal profiles for the lower levels of the atmosphere and estimate the height of the mixing layer. The most important industrial sources are also monitored. The pollutant emission control is carried out by measuring the concentration of SC>2, particles and NOx along with the volumetric flow of gas in the stack (see Table 2). The data are continuously measured and sent by radio to the Control Centre in CIDMA where the data are recorded every 15 minutes. CODE NAME GAS FLOW S02 PM NOx 101 RTM1 *** *** *** 102 RTM2 *** *** 103 RTM3 *** *** 201 AS1 *** *** *** *$* 202 AS 1-2 301 AS3 *** *** 302 AS4 *** *** 303 AS4-2 *** 304 AS3-2 *** 501 FCC *** *** *** *** *** *** 502 Refinery 601 Calcinador *** *** 801 M. Crudo 1 *** *** 802 Oven 1 *** *** 803 M. Crudo 2 *** *** 804 Oven 2 *** *** 1001 Power Plant *** *** *** Table 2. Stations for pollutant emission monitoring Non-monitored sources such as small stacks of industries and mobile sources are also taking into account. Most of the non-monitored stacks (about 100) are checked by inspections making manual measurements of the pollutant and gas flow periodically. These data are used by SIC AH to obtain virtual sources (11 virtual sources) gathering the non-monitored stacks, that is, a virtual source includes all the non-monitored stacks of a factory. The resulted values for pollutant emission from virtual sources are used by SICAH as default values if the factory is active. Pollutant emissions due to road traffic has been also estimated and spatial and time disaggregated starting from the data of provincial annual totals emissions of SO2, CO and particles including the emission factors of each pollutant (based on Inventories CORJNE - Air 1985, such as were provided by the Environmental Council from a report of AICIA [5]. The applied methodology is widely explained in Palacios and Martin [6]. The spatial resolution is 1x1 Km^ and the daily cycle (hourly data) of pollutant emission Transactions on Ecology and the Environment vol 13, © 1997 WIT Press, www.witpress.com, ISSN 1743-3541 156 Measurements and Modelling in Environmental Pollution were estimated, supposing an average (in meteorological aspects) day representative (a working day) of the year.