I refer to air pollution in the city of Santiago, which also has poor ventilation.
Dear Marcelo E R Vidal. You need to be more specific: impact on what? I assume on health of the citizen living nearby. In that case it also depends on what you mean by measure. Do you want to actually measure short term effects by, e.g. measuring blood pressure or lung function. Or to investigate long term effects by comparing emergency visits or prescriptions among those living nearby and those living further away? The simplest is probably to model exposure from the airport and compare visits or prescriptions from local hospitals with those in a comparable group living in a less polluted area. Though it's difficult to find such a comparable group that does not differ in life-style factors affecting health.
I am referring to the atmospheric pollution of particulate matter and greenhouse gases, such as carbon dioxide.
Dear Marcello, with historical and projected data on: numbers of departures; departure routes/procedures; a defined airspace range and altitude boundary for Santiago; the types of aircraft/engine configurations; the operational procedures (from start to departing the boundary); the ATM procedures; and the known fuel burn for each aircraft configuration; you would be able to model total fuel burn and therefore total CO2 production. You would also be able to model the production for days, weeks, months and seasons depending on the quality of your data. You will also be able to build a list of fuel-efficiency carbon-reduction actions and run those through the model to see how much CO2 - and other associated pollutants - each initiative - or bundle of initiatives with deliver. You could go a step further and include a function in the model to account for meteorological conditions - this may look like: number of days per year there are inversion conditions of Santiago, or the effects of wind strength and direction. This sounds like very interesting research - good luck!
Do you have any on-line equipment to measure PM2.5, BC, particle number concentration, VOCs? If so, you could set up a monitoring site in the vicinity of the airfield. This has been done in California.
Please check the references in our published paper on air pollution at airports:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S136192091630654X
Hi Marcelo. Sound like you're interested in both impact from particles and carbon dioxide. Particles have local effects in contrast to CO2 and are a concern for employees and other projects have also studied this, e.g. https://www2.dmu.dk/pub/tr15.pdf
Dear Marcello, you could use IMPACT, which is an online tool developed by EUROCONTROL and dedicated to multi-airport environmental impact assessments for noise, gaseous and particulate emissions, and local air quality. Good luck!
That's a great suggestion Bekir. Perhaps a first step could be to contact LAN Chile Flight Operations as they will probably have an excellent data set for aviation fuel burn. It is likely that LAN Chile has a Carbon Reduction Programme that monitors fuel burn and implements actions across the spectrum of airline activities to reduce it: accessing that would be the Holy Grail of data for you. The alternative would be the DGAC in Santiago, if they don't have the data they should be able to provide them - or potentially even sponsor the work. The problem with setting up monitoring sites or health checks is that you will be measuring the effects of pollutants produce outside aviation. Interesting research!
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