| Abstract: | For environmental analysis such as the dispersion of pollutants in the atmosphere, it is essential to have meteorological data that are relevant for a long period. In this paper, we explore the possibility of using an environmental Test Reference Year (TRY), i.e., a set of real, contemporaneous and hourly meteorological variables, 'extracted' from a hourly series of at least 10 years, for modelling pollutant dispersion in the atmosphere. The classical approach, based on a statistical data set, implies the loss of important information such as the real correlation between the different meteorological variables, and this implies crude approximation in the simulation results. We compare the simulation results with the long hourly 10 years data set (which can be considered a 'brute force' approach, since it requires a huge amount of data and time processing, but it is here considered the most severe benchmark) and with the statistical data set commonly used. It is shown that the results obtained using the TRY have a good agreement with the ones obtained with the simulation of the 10 years and they are also much better than those obtained using the statistical data set. |
