Comparison of the performance of two atmospheric dispersion models (AERMOD and ADMS) for open pit mining sources of air pollution

Abstract

The performance of the AERMOD and ADMS dispersion models was tested using PM10 (thoracic dust) emissions from Rössing Uranium Mine open pit in Namibia. The performance of the two models was evaluated against the observations and also against each other using various statistical measures. The models were tested under different case scenarios (cases explained in chapter 4) with the aim of evaluating their performances as well as their inter model variability. The study was undertaken from the 13 July 2009 – 14 August 2009. The results from the study showed that the performance of ADMS was superior to that of AERMOD. In general, the performance of AERMOD was very poor and simulated extremely high concentration values. AERMOD performed even more poorly during calm conditions. ADMS performance was superior to AERMOD as was evident from the values of various performance statistical measures and a conclusion reached was that ADMS is likely to be a better model to use in cases where prolonged calm conditions are experienced. Copyright