Rutgers/EOHSI builds model to assess World Trade Cent...( witnessed the attacks and saw the fire ...),Health

witnessed the attacks and saw the fire that followed, might expect that people in the plume vicinity could be at health risk; the work of Stenchikov and his co-authors addresses: How much, and where, giving public health authorities much more information about contaminant distribution and the physical process involved.

New York, like most big cities, had air-quality monitoring systems in place on the morning of the attack. But there were three problems: first, they weren't designed to monitor the fallout from such a massive event; second, many sensors in lower Manhattan went offline when the power was cut; and, finally, many became clogged with debris. But not all of the sensors went down; enough stayed in action to help Stenchikov and his colleagues to test and calibrate their model predictions. The satellite data provided a regional map of plume height and extent, used to better initialize the model and to constrain the simulations.

The scientists built their model to fill the gaps in observations and crack a puzzle of missing pieces. To reconstruct the dispersion of contaminants, they first "down-scaled" the output from the best weather forecast model available, using the Regional Atmospheric Modeling System (RAMS) to obtain high-quality micrometeorological fields with a spatial resolution of 250 meters. Then they fed this information into another mathematical model, the Hybrid Particle and Concentration Transport (HYPACT), which allowed them to calculate contaminant transport and distribution. Stenchikov and his colleagues combine their modeling results with the surface-based and space-based observations. With this combination, they took a major step in characterizing the air-pollution generated by the 9/11 tragedy in the New York City and nearby areas. This information will be crucial for further studies of the impact of air pollution on people and the environment, and will be of use to researchers tracking the specific health effects of the p
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Contact: Ken Branson
kbranson@ur.rutgers.edu
732-932-7084
Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey
29-Jun-2006

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