Estimative of urban plume dispersion parameters for the city of Manaus based on airplane and satellite observations

• Grant number: 23/06157-0
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Scientific Initiation
• Start date: June 01, 2023
• End date: May 31, 2024
• Field of knowledge: Physical Sciences and Mathematics - Geosciences - Meteorology
• Principal Investigator: Luciana Varanda Rizzo
• Grantee: Artur Libanio de Araujo Yordaky
• Host Institution: Instituto de Física (IF). Universidade de São Paulo (USP). São Paulo , SP, Brazil
• Associated research grant: 22/07974-0 - Synergistic effects of climate change and land use on carbon source and sink of Amazon forest ecosystem, AP.PFPMCG.TEM

Abstract

The city of Manaus is located in the Central Amazon, surrounded by hundreds of kilometers of tropical forest areas. The combination of atmospheric pollutant emissions from vehicular sources and thermoelectric plants forms an urban plume that can reach tens of kilometers in length. As the plume is carried downwind of the city, pollutants from urban emissions interact with biogenic emissions from the forest, leading to the formation of secondary pollutants such as ozone. It is important to characterize the dispersion of the urban plume to better understand its impacts on the forest and on the regional climate. The main objective of this scientific initiation project is to characterize dispersion parameters of the urban plume from Manaus based on in situ aerial observations (GoAmazon2014/5 experiment) and satellite observations (TROPOMI sensor, on board of the S5P satellite). Average horizontal distributions of concentration of pollutants CO, NOx and number of aerosols will be evaluated in an area of about 1x1º in the wind region below Manaus, during wet and dry seasons. The years 2014, when the aerial measurements of the GoAmazon2014/5 experiment were carried out, and the years 2019 to 2023, during which daily NO2 data from TROPOMI are available with a spatial resolution of about 1 km, will be considered. Geostatistical analysis techniques will be used to interpolate the plane data, delimit the extent of the urban plume and extract dispersion parameters such as: transverse dispersion coefficients (Ã_y) and longitudinal concentration attenuation rates. Data processing and analysis will be performed using codes in Python and in the Google Earth Engine environment. The empirically obtained dispersion parameters will be compared for the different pollutants and for the wet and dry seasons. Finally, simplified inversion methods will be applied to estimate emission rates from the average concentration distributions. This project will be developed within the scope of the thematic project "Synergistic effects of climate change and land use on carbon source and sink of Amazon forest ecosystem" (FAPESP 2022/07974-0).