Comparison of two air quality models in complex terrain near sea shore

Air pollution is the most important environmental problem in Zonguldak, Turkey due to excessive coal combustion and thermal power plant emissions. The city center is located on a complex terrain near the Black Sea shore. There exist some previous studies about PM10 pollution in the study area, but none of them is related to the spatial distribution of the pollutant. This air quality modeling study aims to fill this gap in the literature. Firstly, PM10 emission inventory has been prepared for point, line, and area sources for the year 2011. For that period, bituminous coal was the principal fuel for domestic heating in houses and generating electricity in thermal power plants, therefore particulate matter (PM10) was the leading air pollutant. Emission inventory calculations revealed that 2710.2 tons of PM10 have been emitted to the atmosphere from all sources in the study area. Then, the air quality modeling has been performed for PM10 by using two air quality models: AERMOD and CALPUFF. According to the modeling results, the PM10 pollution levels may pose a health threat to the inhabitants of Zonguldak. The maximum PM10 concentrations predicted by the CALPUFF model were higher than that of the AERMOD model. The model predicted values plus background concentration were validated against the PM10 measurements by using fractional bias, index of agreement, geometric mean bias, and geometric mean-variance. According to the model performance analysis, CALPUFF showed slightly better performance as compared to AERMOD.