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Local Air Quality (LAQ) is an increasingly important issue for airports. Faced with demands on capacity and pressure from local communities, airport operators need to understand and plan their environmental impact to help mitigate the impact of noise and pollution whilst improving safety and airport capacity.
To meet these needs airport operators need accurate emissions inventories and emissions concentration maps correlated with data such as land-use, population density, non-airport sources of pollution, pollution sensitive zones.
The EUROCONTROL Airport Local Air Quality (ALAQS) project was started in 2002 to address these issues.
ALAQS is currently managed in partnership with experts from Universities and industry, and airport air quality specialists. ALAQS also closely collaborates with Research groups (AERONET) and International bodies (ICAO CAEP) working towards guidance on airport air quality issues and interdependancy analysis between Noise and emissions.
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ALAQS' objectives are driven by the needs of both the EUROCONTROL Environment domain and ICAO-CAEP. The project aims to promote best practice methods, raise awareness about local air quality (LAQ) issues, and provide a test bed toolset.
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The ALAQS project aims to promote best practice methods for airport LAQ analysis concerning issues such as emissions inventory, dispersion, and the data required for the calculations, including emission factors, operational data, and aircraft landing and take-off profiles.
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Local Air Quality Awareness |
Through case studies, ALAQS aims to raise the awareness of LAQ issues among airport authorities, focusing on the practical issues of an LAQ study at an airport::- data collection, pollutants, methods for inventory, and dispersion.
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The ALAQS-AV toolset is a GIS (Geographical Information System)-based research tool. It is a test bed that can be used to investigate the sensitivity of different inventory and dispersion methodologies. The choice of a GIS as a test bench simplifies the process of defining the various airport elements (runways, taxiways, buildings, etc.) and allows the spatial distribution of emissions to be visualized.
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The ALAQS project approach is based on delivering case study reports, guidance material, a database of default parameters for European LAQ, and the ALAQS-AV toolset.
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The case studies are used to raise awareness among the airport operators and serve to study the merits and sensitivities of different inventory and dispersion methods.
The studies may be based on actual or predicted traffic.
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The project will deliver guidance material through participation in the ICAO CAEP working group on air quality.
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The airport community need consistent and harmonised data for LAQ studies. The ALAQS emissions factors and operations profiles will provide this for use by airport authorities and planners.
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| The ALAQS-AV tool set provides the classical LAQ analysis features enhanced to allow comparison of different inventory and dispersion methods. |
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The toolset provides:
- 4D emission inventory. The inventory uses the ARCVIEW tool to provide a geospatial and hourly inventory of airport emissions sources. Different inventory methodologies can be compared for all sources related to airport activities – including aircraft (main engines, APU and brake/tyre wear), road vehicles (landside and airside), ground handling (GSE and GPU), infrastructure, and stationary sources (fuel storage, construction, maintenance, power plants, etc.)
- Air Quality Dispersion Assessment. Compare different dispersion methods (Gaussian, Lagrangian and Eulerian),using the results of the 4D inventory. The toolset can also be used to model local air pollution concentrations for actual, generic and future situations.
- Mitigation Planning: Forecast the efficiency of proposed air pollution abatement measures in the context of reducing emissions from airport related sources together with issues concerning sustainable growth of an airport.
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Previous activities include:
- the development of the ArcView (GIS)-based ALAQS-AV emission inventory calculation tool;
- the development of the detailed emission calculation methodologies for GSE (Ground Support Equipment);
- the acquisition of the English version of the emissions and dispersion model LASPORT and evaluation of its features as basis for ALAQS-AV development;
- the carrying out of pilot studies at Lyon (Saint-Exupéry), Zurich (Klöten), Bucharest (Henry Coanda), and Warsaw (F.Chopin) airports;
- the production of documentation describing the ALAQS concept and the ALAQS-AV toolset; and
- the carrying out of sensitivity studies on aircraft landing and take-off profiles.
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| Priorities for 2006 through 2007 are the development and validation of a dispersion modelling toolset and further validation of the inventory methodology. Further case studies to support this work will focus on sensitivity analyses at the partner airports (applicability of different dispersion modelling methods to the airport scenario) and improved chemistry. |
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If you would like more information, contact:
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