CAMEO vs Hysplit

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lego007
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Joined: May 5th, 2021, 4:38 pm
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CAMEO vs Hysplit

Post by lego007 »

To monitor short-term (no more than a week) for point source pollutants area, which software is more beneficial to use?
CAMEO is for short-range (<10 km) but Hysplit can monitor/trajectory to a specific hour. Is there a way to use both for short-term and short-range?

Thanks
alicec
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Joined: February 8th, 2016, 12:56 pm
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Re: CAMEO vs Hysplit

Post by alicec »

CAMEO is a Gaussian plume model while HYSPLIT is a Lagrangian transport and dispersion model.
The Gaussian plume models are quite fast and accurate in the region where the plume retains a nice
Gaussian shape. This is generally when meteorological conditions/ winds are steady.

The Lagrangian transport and dispersion models in theory should give same answer as Gaussian plume models
in the short range but would generally take much more computational power to give you essentially the same answer.
For instance you would have to use a lot of computational particles, a high resolution spatial grid, and a small model time step.

HYSPLIT smallest time step is currently 1 minute which is the main limitation when modeling short range.

When deciding which to use you need to decide what kind of temporal and spatial resolution you need and what the meteorological conditions are.
For instance, when you say "no more than a week", a week is a fairly long time to track an emission over. Unless you mean that you are looking at continuous emission and only want to model the plume from the continuous emission close to the source.

It would certainly be possible to run both models.
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