Advanced emergency preparedness and response tools for airborne hazardous materials in urban environments
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abstract
The atmospheric release of hazardous materials in urban environment can be the result of an accident with potential consequences in local or regional scale or can be an intentional act of violence. In all cases, these events raise concerns for public health and in general for the communityâ s welfare. Additionally, in such cases the highest uncertainty is associated with the location of the release and the quantity of the released substance. The proposed project aims at advancing the state-of-the-art in this direction and developing tools in order to locate the source and quantify the release rate in the case of acute chemical and biological incidents in urban environments. More specifically, the project will deal with the following three specific aspects of the problem: i) how to correlate and convert health observations - symptoms â like coughing, headaches, asthma attacks and deaths to doses received and air concentration levels of hazardous substances, ii) what numerical techniques to combine with computational fluid dynamics models to locate and quantify the release of hazardous material and iii) how to combine local and regional atmospheric dispersion models in the case that the source is outside the urban domain â airshed. To achieve the general aim, the project team will provide a rigorous description of hazardous material accidental events based on an integrated approach by developing efficient numerical and biomedical techniques. The development of the tools will be based on data assimilation algorithms and numerical techniques able to describe the source characteristics. Biomedical databases and models will be employed in order to translate observations to useful input data for the atmospheric dispersion models. Computational fluid dynamic approaches will be formulated and tested to resolve the wind flow inside the complex urban terrain, necessary for the dispersion models..........
