Evaluation of advanced emergency response methodologies to estimate the unknown source characteristics of the hazardous material within urban environments
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Crown Copyright 2014 Dstl. While advances in computational and information technology have enabled sophisticated emergency response management systems to be produced, accurate prediction of the dispersion of airborne hazards on a local scale within urban environments remains a serious scientific challenge. In the present paper an innovative computational data assimilation algorithm for estimating the location and rate of an unknown stationary point source of passive atmospheric pollutant in a complex urban geometry recently developed in NCSR "Demokritos" is evaluated. The evaluation was performed by using the measurements of the turbulent flow, 1:225 novel scale of wind tunnel model of the Environmental Wind Tunnel Laboratory at Hamburg University. These novel experiments concerned the dispersion of a passive tracer on the idealized Central-European urban environment model, called "Michel-Stadt" in order to provide data for the validation of local scale emergency response models in the frame of COST Action ES1006 (Evaluation, improvement and guidance for the use of local-scale emergency prediction and response tools for airborne hazards in build environments). The variational data assimilation algorithm has been implemented in the Computational Fluid Dynamics model "ADREA-HF" in order to locate the unknown source and calculate its emission strength by assimilating concentration measured data in the computational model simulations. Good results of source parameters (location and source rate) estimation have been achieved. Further improvement can be achieved by improving the performance of the forward model. The operational applicability of the data assimilating model in the frame of an emergency response system over a broad range of possible threats within urban environments can be justified.
