Development of a moving point source model for shipping emission dispersion modeling in EPISODE–CityChem v1.3

Abstract

This paper demonstrates the development of a moving point source (MPS) model for simulating the atmospheric dispersion of pollutants emitted from ships under movement. The new model is integrated into the chemistry transport model EPISODE–CityChem v1.3. In the new model, ship parameters, especially speed and direction, are included to simulate the instantaneous ship positions and then the emission dispersion at different simulation time. The model was first applied to shipping emission dispersion modeling under simplified conditions, and the instantaneous and hourly averaged emission concentrations predicted by the MPS model and the commonly used line source (LS) and fixed point source (FPS) models were compared. The instantaneous calculations were quite different due to the different ways to treat the moving emission sources by different models. However, for the hourly averaged concentrations, the differences became smaller, especially for a large number of ships. The new model was applied to a real configuration from the seas around Singapore that included hundreds of ships, and their dispersion was simulated over a period of a few hours. The simulated results were compared to measured values at different locations, and it was found that reasonable emission concentrations were predicted by the moving point source model.