NAME atmospheric pollution dispersion model''Air Quality Programme and Progress''
Met Office Scientific Advisory Committee (MOSAC), November 11–12, 2004
, 3rd Quarter, 1996
, December 2000 was first developed by the UK's

Met Office The Met Office, until November 2000 officially the Meteorological Office, is the United Kingdom's national weather and climate service. It is an executive agency and trading fund of the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology and ...

in 1986 after the nuclear accident at

Chernobyl Chernobyl, officially called Chornobyl, is a partially abandoned city in Vyshhorod Raion, Kyiv Oblast, Ukraine. It is located within the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, to the north of Kyiv and to the southwest of Gomel in neighbouring Belarus. ...

, which demonstrated the need for a method that could predict the spread and deposition of

radioactive Radioactive decay (also known as nuclear decay, radioactivity, radioactive disintegration, or nuclear disintegration) is the process by which an unstable atomic nucleus loses energy by radiation. A material containing unstable nuclei is conside ...

gases or material released into the

atmosphere An atmosphere () is a layer of gases that envelop an astronomical object, held in place by the gravity of the object. A planet retains an atmosphere when the gravity is great and the temperature of the atmosphere is low. A stellar atmosph ...

. The acronym, NAME, originally stood for the ''Nuclear Accident ModEl''. The Met Office has revised and upgraded the model over the years and it is now used as a general purpose dispersion model. The current version is known as the NAME III (''Numerical Atmospheric-dispersion Modelling Environment'') model. NAME III is currently operational and it will probably completely replace the original NAME model sometimes in 2006.

Features and capabilities of NAME

NAME (in its current NAME III version) is a

Lagrangian Lagrangian may refer to: Mathematics * Lagrangian function, used to solve constrained minimization problems in optimization theory; see Lagrange multiplier ** Lagrangian relaxation, the method of approximating a difficult constrained problem with ...

air pollution dispersion model for short range to global range scales. It employs 3-dimensional meteorological data provided by the Met Office's ''Unified National Weather Prediction Model''.

Random walk In mathematics, a random walk, sometimes known as a drunkard's walk, is a stochastic process that describes a path that consists of a succession of random steps on some Space (mathematics), mathematical space. An elementary example of a rand ...

techniques using

empirical Empirical evidence is evidence obtained through sense experience or experimental procedure. It is of central importance to the sciences and plays a role in various other fields, like epistemology and law. There is no general agreement on how t ...

turbulence In fluid dynamics, turbulence or turbulent flow is fluid motion characterized by chaotic changes in pressure and flow velocity. It is in contrast to laminar flow, which occurs when a fluid flows in parallel layers with no disruption between ...

profiles are utilized to represent turbulent mixing. In essence, NAME follows the 3-dimensional trajectories of parcels of the pollution plume and computes pollutant concentrations by

Monte Carlo method Monte Carlo methods, or Monte Carlo experiments, are a broad class of computational algorithms that rely on repeated random sampling to obtain numerical results. The underlying concept is to use randomness to solve problems that might be ...

s — that is, by direct simulation rather than solving equations. NAME uses a puff technique when modelling dispersion over a short range which shortens the time needed to compute the pollutant concentrations at the receptors. The model has the capability to calculate: the rise of buoyant plumes; deposition of pollution plume components due to rainfall (i.e.,

wet deposition In the physics of aerosols, deposition is the process by which aerosol particles collect or deposit themselves on solid surfaces, decreasing the concentration of the particles in the air. It can be divided into two sub-processes: ''dry'' and ''w ...

);

dry deposition In the physics of aerosols, deposition is the process by which aerosol particles collect or deposit themselves on solid surfaces, decreasing the concentration of the particles in the air. It can be divided into two sub-processes: ''dry'' and ''w ...

; plume chemistry focusing on sulphate and nitrate chemistry; plume depletion via the decay of radioactive materials; the downwash effects of buildings. The model can also be run 'backwards' to generate maps that locate possible plume originating sources.

The Met Office's commitments to emergency response service

The Met Office has international commitments Met Office Emergency Response Capability
/ref> to provide emergency response dispersion modelling services for releases of hazardous gases and materials into the atmosphere. Such events include the release of radioactive materials and emissions from erupting volcanoes. Those commitments are met by an operational group known as EMARC who are supported by a Met Office team of dispersion modelling staff. That team is also responsible for the scientific development of NAME III which, combined with the Met Office numerical weather prediction model, is used to provide the dispersion modelling services needed to implement the listed commitments: *The WMO (''World Meteorological Office'') has designated the Met Office to operate one of the worldwide RSMCs (''Regional Specialist Meteorological Centre'') *The Met Office has also been designated a VAAC (''Volcanic Ash Advisory Centre'') which is part of the IAVW (''International Airways Volcano Watch'') set up by the

ICAO The International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO ) is a specialized agency of the United Nations that coordinates the principles and techniques of international air navigation, and fosters the planning and development of international sch ...

(''International Civil Aviation Organization''). Over the years, NAME has been applied to radioactive releases, the

Kuwaiti oil fires The Kuwaiti oil fires were caused by the Iraqi military setting fire to a reported 605 to 732 oil wells along with an unspecified number of oil filled low-lying areas, such as oil lakes and fire trenches while retreating from Kuwait in 1991 due ...

, major industrial fires and chemical spills, and two

volcanic eruptions in Iceland A volcano is commonly defined as a vent or fissure in the crust of a planetary-mass object, such as Earth, that allows hot lava, volcanic ash, and gases to escape from a magma chamber below the surface. On Earth, volcanoes are most often fou ...

References

NELOY ADI

* {{Atmospheric, Oceanographic and Climate Models Atmospheric dispersion modeling Met Office

Features and capabilities of NAME

The Met Office's commitments to emergency response service

See also

References

Further reading

NELOY ADI