Improvement of source and wind field input of atmospheric dispersion model by assimilation of concentration measurements: Method and applications in idealized settings

The problem of correcting the pollutant source emission rate and the wind velocity field inputs in a puff atmospheric dispersion model by data assimilation of concentration measurements has been considered. Variational approach to data assimilation has been used, in which the specified cost function is minimized with respect to source strength and/or wind field. The analyzed wind field satisfied the constraints derived from the conditions of mass conservation and linearized flow equations for perturbations from the first guess wind field. ‘Identical twin’ numerical experiments have been performed for the validation of the method. The first guess estimation errors of source emission rate and wind field were set to a factor of up to 10 and up to 6 m/s respectively. The calculations results showed that in most studied cases an improvement of vector wind difference (VWD) error by about 0.7–1 m/s could be achieved. The resulting normalized mean square error (NMSE) of concentration field was also reduced significantly.