Upscaling pollutant dispersion in the Mexico City Metropolitan Area

Pollutant emission is an important problem in megacities such as Mexico City, imposing serious threats to human health and economic activity. Public policies oriented to deal with pollutant management ought to be based upon a close understanding of the transport mechanisms involved in the commonly complex network of streets and buildings. Modeling and simulation tools have proved to be useful for understanding field measurements and developing efficient monitoring strategies. The aim of this work is to provide estimations of the (longitudinal and transverse) dispersion coefficients in upscaled models for pollutant transport in the Mexico City Metropolitan Area (MCMA). To this end, we use the method of volume averaging, which allows calculation of the dispersion coefficients by solving the associated closure problems in some representative regions of the MCMA. The results show that local geometry has an important effect upon contaminant dispersion, especially in the direction that is transverse to the pressure gradient. This suggests that, although winds can remove an important amount of atmospheric contaminants, high transversal dispersion can help in a fast spreading of contaminants within the street network. (C) 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.