Dissemination of the project results to city developers and wider audiences will be made. The short-term air pollutant concentrations with different planning alternatives in the planned city boulevard accounting for accessibility, travelling efficiency and socio-economic structures will be estimated and recommendations for urban planning provided. For example, with one urban built environment structure certain population groups are more likely to move in, creating particular traffic scenarios furthermore impacting the local air quality and exposure of the different population groups. The local air quality distributions are largely dependent on the built environment structure (including buildings, trees, etc.) and therefore we will also examine the scalability of the DRL algorithms with different neighborhoods. Some information is provided with the different urban planning alternatives of the planned city boulevard, but we will furthermore examine the performance of the algorithms with existing street canyon in Helsinki.
The neighborhood was selected as in addition to PALM produced air quality fields comprehensive measurement campaigns with mobile laboratory and drone providing detailed spatial air pollutant distributions were conducted at the site in summer and winter 2017. This data combined with existing traffic and socio-economic data allows us to examine the suitability of the DRL algorithms to other street canyons. For these runs, observed meteorology and ADCHEM (Roldin et al. 2011) model simulations will be used as a boundary condition for selected periods during the campaigns (Kurppa et al. 2019).
In addition to Helsinki, the scalability of the DRL algorithm in other cities will be studied. The high resolution distributions of air pollutant concentrations in neighborhoods in Malmö (Sweden), Turin (Italy) and Guildford (UK) will be simulated for selected few hour periods using PALM. The model outputs together with known traffic distributions and socio-economic information provided via collaboration with the respective researchers allows us to examine how well the algorithms developed in Helsinki will reproduce the air quality fields in these cities with different neighbourhoods. The cities were selected as there are also measured data available allowing to evaluate the model performance at the same time when testing the algorithms. Again, ADCHEM model will be used to provide boundary conditions for pollutants whereas other needed data with 3D surface maps, emissions factors and meteorology will be obtained from the respective researchers.