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No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

Due to the common sources of emissions of both air quality pollutants and greenhouse gases, management measures directed at one category of emissions are likely to impact the other whether positively or negatively. In the United Kingdom, through the local air quality management (LAQM) process, local authorities are required to monitor and measure specified air pollutants, the sources of which are often also a primary sources of carbon emissions at a local level. This research tracks the progression of local authority management of carbon emissions and examines the barriers and opportunities for the integration of carbon emissions into the LAQM process. Results are triangulated from three core research methods deployed in South West England: (1) a time series of local authority questionnaire surveys distributed to over 60 local government officers across 45 local authorities; (2) secondary data analysis of all 12 active Air Quality Action Plans; and (3) case study interviews of 12 local government officers within six local authorities in the region. This analysis demonstrates a common lack of communication between Air Quality Officers and Officers with Carbon Management Responsibilities in the South West. Nonetheless, a framework is proposed to develop communication streams to better link LAQM to carbon management within the existing structures of local government. This co-management approach is designed to overcome the barriers that occur for both parties within the current organisational structure, and enables mutually-beneficial strategic policies to be fed directly into the local authorities' Corporate Plan. Further, it is designed to provide an increased awareness of linkages, increase communications between responsible officers, and to better combine and exploit their respective skill sets. The extension of pollutant inventory development by the Air Quality Officers to also include implications for climate change gases is central to this proposed framework. The research concludes that the absence of statutory targets for carbon emission reductions remains a substantial barrier for local authority led carbon management initiatives .

There is a growing concern on the pollution resulting from airport operations because of the expansion of air traffic over the years. Global effects such as depletion of the ozone layer and global warming are a direct consequence of the local activities around airports. To assess these impacts and quantify the amount of pollution resulting from airport operations, operators and regulators have to rely on dispersion modelling techniques to estimate existing situations and predict future scenarios.

Motivated by the potential danger of high air pollution concentrations (episodes) on human health and the environment, the overall aim of this thesis is to gain a greater understanding of and insight into the formation of such episodic conditions via proposing new extreme value statistical models. The modelling and prediction of air pollution episodes' occurrence, strength and dur~tion are formidable problems in the urban atmospheric media due to the combination of many complex simultaneously working physical and chemical processes involved in their formations. It has been long observed that conventional statistical methods may not be suitable for solving these problems, thus initiating the application of more flexible approaches. In the last couple of decades Extreme Value Theory (EVT) has been widely used with great success to overcome some of the aforementioned issues. However, even the most recent EVT models cannot deal with all the aspects of these problems. The objective of this research is to specify the requirements of new extreme value models by taking into account the demerits of the old ones, to develop such new models and validate their adequacy on real datasets. To place this research in relation to the wide-ranging existing literature and to identify the model requirements, a comprehensive review on EVT and its applications in air pollution modelling has been conducted. Based on the gaps identified in the literature, four extreme value models are proposed in the Peaks over Threshold context, which are either improvements on existing models or completely new ones involving new theoretical results in the background. Based on these models, and their possible amalgamations, the occurrence times, the strengths and the durations of episodes can be modelled and predicted. The relationship between these characteristics and meteorological as well as traffic conditions are identified, which are considered as the most significant contributors to these events.

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No description available.