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Pollution of the Urban Midlands Atmosphere (PUMA) Project

Overview

The PUMA project involved intensive measurement campaigns in the Summer of 1999 and Winter of 1999/2000, in which a wide variety of air pollutants were measured in the UK West Midlands conurbation. The specific project objectives were as follows:

• Apply a high spatial resolution meso-scale model to a major UK conurbation (the West Midlands) and validate in three dimensions.
• Add a coupled dispersion and atmospheric chemistry model capable of predicting primary and secondary air pollutant concentrations at urban background locations across the conurbation. Validate against measurements of CO, SO₂, NO_x, O₃, inorganic particulate matter and compare with existing UAM model.
• Measure a wide range of transient and long-lived chemical species including hydrocarbons, carbonyl compounds, oxyacids if nitrogen and the free radical species OH, HO₂, RO₂ and NO₃.
• Gain insights into the chemical processes controlling the composition of the urban atmosphere.
• To produce a management model applicable for national and local government to predict the impact on air quality of specific control strategies for a wide range of criteria pollutants and on a range of timescales from minutes to years.

The Centre for Atmospheric Science's Involvement in PUMA

The Manchester PUMA team consisting of Dr Keith Bower, Dr Ian Stromberg, and Dr Rachel Burgess pictured with the Cessna aircraft used in the study. Dr Stromberg was also the pilot of the aircraft.

The centre's instrumented Cessna aircraft was used to complement the PUMA ground based measurements by making airborne measurements of a range of pollutants around the measurement area. In total nine measurement flights were made during the summer 1999 campaign, and seven measurement flgihts were made during the winter 1999/2000 campaign. Typical flight plans consisted of a square box pattern centred on the Birmingham area. These measurements had the following objectives:

• Deliver a database of boundary layer characteristics including profiles of temperature, dewpoint, total aerosol (>50 nm), aerosol size distribution, (0.1 - 3.0 µm) and trace gases (NO_x, O₃ and H₂O).
• Provide boundary layer structure information under a variety of atmospheric thermal conditions within the PUMA model domain.

These airborne measurements provided a direct comparison of the properties of the airmass upstream and downstream of the West Midlands conurbation under a variety of meteorological conditions, and also aided in the interpretation of data from localised ground based measurements. Additionally as the aircraft was also equipped to make turbulence measurements, turbulent fluxex of pollutants originating from the conurbation were calculated.