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Air Pollution Sources, Statistics and Health Effects pp 163–191Cite as

Urban Air Quality: Meteorological Processes

Part of the Encyclopedia of Sustainability Science and Technology Series book series (ESSTS)

  • Originally published in
  • R. A. Meyers (ed.), Encyclopedia of Sustainability Science and Technology, © Springer Science+Business Media LLC, 2012

Glossary

Building and street scales :

Scales of buildings or streets; tens to hundreds of meters.

Fast approximate model (FAM) :

A model which uses approximations and parameterizations of the fine scale flow to speed up model run times and reduce complexity.

Fully computational model (FCM) :

A model which explicitly represents flow and turbulence around buildings.

Mesoscale :

Scale of weather systems smaller than synoptic scale but larger than microscale or urban scale; tens to hundreds of kilometers.

Neighborhood scale :

Scale typical of groups of buildings or streets; hundreds of meters to a few kilometers.

Porosity :

The volume fraction of air between buildings and therefore a measure of building density.

Urban air quality :

A general term representing concentrations of pollutants in an urban area. Good air quality corresponds to low concentrations of pollutants.

Urban meteorology :

Meteorology within an urban area; the urban environment significantly affects mean flow turbulence...

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Cambridge Environmental Research Consultants, Cambridge, UK

    David Carruthers

  2. Dipartimento di Scienza dei Materiali, Università del Salento, Lecce, Italy

    Silvana Di Sabatino

  3. University College London, London, UK

    Julian Hunt

Authors
  1. David Carruthers
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  2. Silvana Di Sabatino
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  3. Julian Hunt
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. School of Civil, Environmental and Mining Engineering The Australian School of Petroleum, The University of Adelaide, Adelaide, SA, Australia

    Michael Evan Goodsite

  2. Department of Chemistry, University of Copenhagen, Airlabs, Copenhagen, Denmark

    Prof. Matthew Stanley Johnson

  3. Department of Environmental Sciences, Aarhus University, Roskilde, Denmark

    Ole Hertel

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Carruthers, D., Di Sabatino, S., Hunt, J. (2012). Urban Air Quality: Meteorological Processes. In: Goodsite, M.E., Johnson, M.S., Hertel, O. (eds) Air Pollution Sources, Statistics and Health Effects. Encyclopedia of Sustainability Science and Technology Series. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-0716-0596-7_427

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