Prolor, a Simplified Way to Communicate Odour Forecasts Through a Complex and Reliable Modelling System

Abstract

Odour pollution is gaining more attention every day because of the immediate nuisance associated to this “pollutant”. Frequent odour episodes give rise to a number of complaints from the people living around the plants from which odorants may be emitted. Therefore, it is in the interest of plant owners and managers to try to reduce odour impact and to decrease the number of odour episodes. In this way, it is possible to establish good relationships with the communities around a plant, and ensure its long-term production. For this purpose, it is important to have reliable tools capable of forecasting the ambient odour concentration at specific sensible receptors around the plant for the next few days and give alerts when specific thresholds may be exceeded. In this way, if the plant has the possibility to reduce its emissions for those specific hours, odour episodes may be avoided and the complaints may be reduced. Odour forecasting tools already exist, but they mainly rely on web platforms more or less challenging that, at the end, nobody checks on a day-by-day basis. Some of them have daily alerts included in their packages, but as they are bundled into the system, the cost is usually very high. The strength of the PrOlor system here described is the apparent simplicity of its core module as perceived by the user. Indeed, the user just receives an email up to four times a day, reporting for each sensible receptor the future hours where the exceedance of a specific odour threshold is foreseen. The system is based on the automated model chain composed by GFS, WRF, CALMET and CALPUFF that runs on a cloud server, without the need for the user to install any software or to access any web site. The use of a cloud platform guarantees the uptime of the service, and even complex scenarios can be simulated by adequately configuring the computational resources employed. There is a need for more simple, cost-effective tools for odour managers to take decisions without the burden of having to operate platforms difficult to understand on a day-by-day basis. That is why a simple cost-effective e-mail system with odour alerts comes in handy to plan processes in order to avoid odour incidents.