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HYSPLIT Air Toxics Workshop

Introduction:

Atmospheric fate and transport of air toxics.

A one-day training session on the application of HYSPLIT to model the atmospheric fate and transport of air toxics was given Aug 24 2009 in Mexico City. The course was part of a week-long workshop under the auspices of the Commission for Environmental Cooperation (CEC).

This one-day course was given by Mark Cohen (NOAA Air Resources Laboratory) and Paul Bartlett (St. Peter's College and City University of New York). This course and the entire week-long workshop were organized by Henry Wohrnschimmel, Beatriz Cardenas, and Abraham Ortinez of the National Institute for Ecology, and Luke Trip of the CEC.

On this page, links are given to the "lecture materials" (e.g., powerpoint) files used in the training. In addition, several "hands-on" exercises were included in the training, and links to the data and programs necessary to carry out these exercises are also included on this page. Some of the material used in this class was taken from earlier HYSPLIT workshops.

Lecture Materials:

The course materials were divided into 14 segments, and materials for each segment are provided here in pdf and ppt formats. Note that animation in the ppt (powerpoint) files is not included in the pdf format, but, the entire content of each slide is present. If desired, users without PowerPoint can download and install a free PowerPoint viewer from Microsoft.

  1. Course Overview (also available as as a PowerPoint presentation [0.6 MB]).
  2. Air Toxics Overview (also available as as a PowerPoint presentation [3.6 MB]).
  3. HYSPLIT Introduction (also available as as a PowerPoint presentation [1.3 MB]).
  4. Meteorological Data (also available as as a PowerPoint presentation [2.5 MB]).
  5. Trajectories (also available as as a PowerPoint presentation [13.3 MB]).
  6. Concentrations and Deposition (also available as as a PowerPoint presentation [15.6 MB]).
  7. HYSPLIT-SV for Semivolatiles (e.g., Dioxin) (also available as as a PowerPoint presentation [4.0 MB]).
  8. HYSPLIT-Hg for Mercury (also available as as a PowerPoint presentation [7.6 MB]).
  9. Emissions Inventories (also available as as a PowerPoint presentation [2.8 MB]).
  10. Source-Receptor Post-Processing Techniques (also available as as a PowerPoint presentation [0.7 MB]).
  11. Examples of Source Attribution Analyses (also available as as a PowerPoint presentation [3.8 MB]).

    Note: material presented by Paul Bartlett regarding dioxin emissions and source attribution for deposition is contained in the report Long-range Air Transport of Dioxin from North American Sources to Ecologically Vulnerable Receptors in Nunavut, Arctic Canada.
  12. Model Evaluation (also available as as a PowerPoint presentation [2.1 MB]).
  13. Model Intercomparisons (also available as as a PowerPoint presentation [1.8 MB]).
  14. Opportunities for Collaboration (also available as as a PowerPoint presentation [1.4 MB]).

Hand's On Exercises:

The Hand's On Exercises are described in the lecture materials above. In the workshop, exercises were carried out in Windows XP. A following steps were taken to create the computational environment necessary to carry out the tests at the workshop. These steps would have to be carried out to re-create the computational environment necessary to do the exercises.

  1. HYSPLIT and associated utilities (e.g., TCL, Ghostscript, etc) must be installed. HYSPLIT version 4.9, February 2009, was used for this training. It is possible that other versions of HYSPLIT will work for the exercises described here (e.g., 4.8, etc), but this is not certain. HYSPLIT and associated utilities can be obtained from the HYSPLIT web page. (note -- A registered version is not required to run these exercises, as forecast data was not used)
  2. Additional files for the HYSPLIT4 installation folders must be downloaded and copied to c:\hysplit4\

    These files are contained in the following zip archive file: hysplit4_added_files.zip. This zip file is ~80 MB, and once downloaded, it must first be unzipped. For reference, a listing of all of the files in this zip archive is available at directory_listing_for_added_files.txt.

    Then, all of these additional folders must be copied to the c:\hysplit4\ folder, in order to run the HANDS-ON EXERCISES from the workshop. Note that the files in the exec folder are not included in the original HYSPLIT installation, and so when you copy this folder to c:\hysplit4\ there is no danger of overwriting any original HYSPLIT installation files.

    3. Atmospheric fate and transport of air toxics.
  3. Meteorological data for the exercises must be downloaded from the ARL Met Data Archives and placed in the c:\hysplit4\metdata\ folder.

    The files that must be downloaded are the following:
    edas.aug08.001, edas.aug08.002, edas.jul08.002, and RP200808.gbl

    The three EDAS files can be obtained from the EDAS 40km Archive.

    The global file can be obtained from the NCAR Reanalysis Archive.

    These met files are very large (the EDAS files are ~500 MB, and the Global file is ~120 MB). Direct links to the files are the following (to download, right-click and choose something like "save target as" or "save link as")

    edas.aug08.001
    edas.aug08.002
    edas.jul08.002
    RP200808.gbl