"DEVELOPMENT AND VERIFICATION OF THE ATMOSPHERIC DISPERSION MODEL FOR EXPOSURE AND RISK ASSESSMENT (- ADMER)" 

Haruyuki Higashino¹, Kouji Kitabayasho², Kazuaki Mita¹, Kazuya Inoue¹, Yoshotaka Yonezawa¹, Junko Nakanishi¹

¹National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology
²Kogakuin University

International Conference for Atmospheric Sciences and Applications to Air Quality (Tsukuba, Japan 2003/3/13)

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Abstract

The emission data of various chemical substances derived from the Pollutant Release and Transfer Register (PRTR) system will soon be made available to the public. Evaluation models and tools to estimate the environmental concentration of chemicals by using these data are greatly needed to perform the exposure and risk assessment.

The ADMER (Atmospheric Dispersion Model for Exposure and Risk Assessment), which estimates atmospheric concentrations and the depositions of chemicals, and also has some useful functions for the assessment, has been developed. ADMER was designed to estimate the long-term average spatiotemporal distribution of the concentrations and depositions of chemicals in a comparatively wide region into which the substances are continuously discharged. The concentrations for a 5 x 5 km square grid spatial resolution of 6 time zones (i.e., 4 hours average) for a month is available.

The model has been well verified. The results of the ADMER in the Kanto area of Japan fit the measured data of the nitrogen oxides (NOx) and tetrachloroethylene well, as determined in cases in which sufficient measured data are available.

The ADMER includes some useful functions for the calculation and the exposure and risk assessment, which is for compiling meteorological data and making up gridded emission data for the simulation, and for analyzing the calculation results by such means as visualizing the calculation results using several kind of maps, charts and graphs, and estimating the size and location of the populations who are exposed to chemicals.

The ADMER has a MS-Windows graphic user interface which may help not only experts of simulation models but also risk assessors working for governments or enterprises to perform simulations. The ADMER will be useful for those risk assessments in which spatiotemporal distributions must be considered.

Keywords

exposure, risk assessment, dispersion model, chemical substances, PRTR