Abstract
The atmospheric dispersion of a pollutant emitted from a hypothetical source located in the middle of the Yochon Industrial Estate was simulated by using the Regional Atmospheric Modeling System (RAMS). Four horizontally nested grids were employed: the coarsest one covered the southern part of the Korean Peninsula including Mt. Chiri and the finest one covered the Yochon Industrial Estate and the surrounding area. Wind fields were initially assumed horizontally homogeneous with a wind speed of 4m/s, the average for the Yosu area, and were developed without both external forces and diurnal changes in order to investigate the terrain-induced phenomena. Wind directions that could emphasize the terrain effects on the pollutant transport and that could carry pollutants to a highly-popluated area were selected for the dispersion study. A pollutant was released for 24hours from a grid-base volume source after a 24-h blank run for developing the wind field. The dispersion study showed that the pollutant from the present source location did not directly affect the Yosu City, but showed high concentrations at locations behind the hills 5 to 6 km away from the source according to wind directions. When the wind speed was low, close to calm condition, the pollutant was detected at upstream locations 6 to 7 km from the source. In comparison with the results from the RAMS simulation, the Industrial Source Complex Short-Term Model(ISCST3) predicted a narrow dispersion that was sensitive to the wind direction. When the wind velocity was affected by the local environment, the ISCST3 calculation using that data also gave a lop-sided result, which was different from the distribution of the pollutant reproduced by RAMS.
