Paolo, the Joint Research Centre at Ispra has performed in collaboration with ARPA a large study of the Lombardy air quality, including a detailed source-apportionment analysis. You can find the report here: http://ita.arpalombardia.it/ITA/qaria/pdf/jrc/Nono%20rapporto_Inglese.pdf. Regards.

Is there no industrial activity in the town, to add to the components supplied by transport systems and residential activities (e.g. coal fire burning). There are usually numerous sources of pollution in urban areas. For example, for urban air pollution, see the work by Prof. Roy Harrison and his group at The University of Birmingham. For water pollution, see our paper in Science of the Total Environment 2006 (attached here), and other on Research gate. Damian

Thank you Damian,

This is the year of air for european union, I would like to point out the problem of air pollution in urban area, mainly the production plant are outside of town, so the emission sources are densely distributed and mobile (transport) and densely distributed and fixed (residential). Have you supplementary suggestions, papers and other material on this item?

thank you again for your help

Hi Paolo,

I'm not an Air Pollution expert (I'm a hydrology and water quality person), but Prof. Roy Harrison and his group are doing world-class work in this air pollution area (e.g. vehicle exhausts (I used to be in the same School as Prof Harrison at The University of Birmingham, UK, before recently moving to set up a new research group at Coventry University). If you visit's Prof Harrison's webpage at www.bham.ac.uk and/or search on his name (and urban air pollution) on Google Scholar or Scopus or Web of Science etc., you'll find lots of key papers on, for example:

* urban air pollution dynamics

* plume spread characteristics

* particle generation and dispersal processes

* typical pollutant atmospheric concentrations

* impacts on human health

Each paper will have lots of good references cited, too, of course.

Hope this helps!

[email protected]

Obviously transport and residential create pollution and transport is unavoidable but residential can be, if the organic solid or liquid wastes are recycled then the amount of pollution will decrease and the waste become a re-usable product. In addition to these, industries create lots of pollution in to the environment . This has to be considered seriously too

Damian

I am a great admirer of prof Harrison and also collaborated with him. However, one should be aware that most of his data are for UK cities/towns and those are not (fully) representative for towns in other parts of Europe. It is quite windy, which lowers concentrations and in other parts of Europe emission s are still higher due to diesel (Athens) or coal use by households (E-Europe).

This also an answer to the queationer you have to specify the sources and meteorology in your specific town.

Thanks a lot Damian,

I'll follow your suggestions

thank you again

keep in touch

Thank you Gunasingham,

yes, recycling residential waste will help and in europe we do it in most of the town, in my opinion what is not controllable is the emission of the heating system, the boiler for sanitary and of course, kitchen where we burn gas to prepare our food. Industrial plant have to be considered but they are placed mainly in the country side, not properly inside the town so the effect on pollution in the town is smaller than the other two.

don't you think is it correct?

awaiting your suggestions

Harry, nice to ear from you, thank you for your advices and suggestions, for me is important to understand if there are other main contribution to air pollution in the town (>100k people) in respect to traffic and residential, please help me to understand the UK situation, so I can compare with the italian one

thanks again

awaiting your help

Paolo

As for Italy there is quite a difference in summer and winter-time pollution.

Especially the winter-time fog periods in northern Italy are notorious.

Note that summer-time is often ozone pollution and that is a regional not a single urban problem. There are quite some studies on the "ozone" photochemical pollution in the Po-valley

Winter time fog is much more a local issue and here Particulate Matter is the main problem.

For specific cities I would google because this is not a real scientific issue for others in the field

For the Po-valley there are even some recent studies, in the free journal Atmospheric Physics and Chemist; but also I recall studies on the diesel issue in Rome, but do not remember a name it used to be (prof) Ivo Allegrini

Paolo, the Joint Research Centre at Ispra has performed in collaboration with ARPA a large study of the Lombardy air quality, including a detailed source-apportionment analysis. You can find the report here: http://ita.arpalombardia.it/ITA/qaria/pdf/jrc/Nono%20rapporto_Inglese.pdf. Regards.

Thank you Rita, I was working at ISPRA and I know the produced report, this one you suggest is the most complete, my question want to point out the fact that in our town the pollution is produced by traffic and residential. Now the question is :how we can decrease the pollution? controlling the emission sources? seems to me we have to apply a new strategy of pollution abatement.

Paolo

You write

emission of the heating system, the boiler for sanitary and of course, kitchen where we burn gas to prepare our food

Such devices are very clean in case natural gas is used, as is probably so in the town you have under consideration. Also, the interurban transport of pollutants can be quite high especially when the nearest towns are close-by like in the Po-Valley. In that case there is quite a base loading of air pollutants on top of which the local emissions are added.

Yes Harry,

you are right in case we burn methane, but the gas distributed in our town is not methane, there are many different compounds, sometimes in my town, Rome, the gas in the kitchen is orange-green, methane give a blu light. Then there is another consideration, almost the totality of the gas network was buided for LPG with high level of humidity and then the pipeline junction did work well, now in the same pipeline we have a more dry gas and the junction are not working properly producing a diffuse leakeage, big source of air pollution.

Paolo

when the flame is not blue it is mostly a sign that the kitchen-stove does not work properly not the quality of the gas that I think comes all the way from Russia, via the Poetin-Berlusconi line.

I have never heard that leakage as a source of air pollution: what kind of poisonous compounds are then emitted? Methane is not an air pollutant

Harry

methane is a light hydrocarbon, why you are not considering it as an air pollutant.

Yes, we have the Putin-Berlusconi pipeline from kazakistan and we have many junction where gas is mixed, measured, depressurized....downto 5bar.

Methane is not a toxic gas at leakage concentrations

@ Harry

CH4 is a GHG and produces about 20 times more warming compared to CO2. 30% of Radiative Forcing is attributed to CH4, so I'd say it's an air pollutant.

@Garwai

I see your point, but also see Harry's. It all depends on the definition of 'pollutant' . CH4 is not considered to be toxic for humans at the emission levels, hence it's emissions and concentration levels are not regulated via air quality policies. The same applies for CO2: although being the major greenhouse gas driving climate change, it is not toxic, and not directly damaging health when you breath it (at the atmospheric levels), and hence not a subject of air quality regulations. CH4 however does have a long-term indirect (small) impact on hemispheric background O3 (which is a toxic pollutant) but this is not significant compared to urban pollution levels.

The discussion looks interesting. Back to original question, limiting the anthropogenic air pollutants associated with morbidities requires an interdisciplinary effort on all levels - individual, local, national, international. Fine PM albeit chemically non-specific is a good example. The American Heart Association's Scientific Statement acknowledges its causal effect on cardiovascular health. It is produced by multiple sources and can travel large distances and cross jurisdictional boundaries, which makes control/abatement strategies difficult. At a recent Climate Change and Health conference, I was impressed with the technological/systems based research on interventions. However, nothing was mentioned about the importance of behaviour change.

Gavin,

thank you for interest and suggestions.

What I'm suggesting is a possible action to reduce the air pollution in urban zone where people live, work and create the own pollution.

As you mentioned:"...nothing was mentioned about the importance of behaviour change." I think that we have to work strongly on this item, "behaviour" and action to do to reduce air pollution.

Again, in my opinion in most of Europe and US and generally all western town, the air pollution is generated by traffic and residential, i.e. generated by people.

traffic emission sources are densely distributed and mobile in the town, residential is densely distributed and fixed in the town.

Acting to control the emission of every single emission source is impossible, then the suggested idea is create a network of dense, distributed and fixed air pollution adsorber in our town.

Let me know what do you and all other colleagues think about this possibility.

Dear Colleagues,

we started to develop the first smart clean air city at the city of L'Aquila in Italy.

We distributed as first phase 20 APA system for air pollution remediation and we got first preliminary results.

daily mean value of PM with APA on and APA off