P18  Urban Mixing Height in Mountainous Terrain. An ARW   Simulation for Aburra Valley (Colombia)

JimŽnez, JosŽ, National University of Colombia, Columbia

One of the major environmental problems of modern metropolis is air pollution, and this problem tends to be worse in develop’ng countries. Actually numerical models can help to understand air quality processes in the cities, but the simulation challenges are often greater when modeling is associated with mountainous urban areas, where air circulation is complicated due to topographic and building conditions. This is the case for the metropolitan Aburra valley (Colombia), which is located in a branch of the Colombian Andes range, at the tropical belt, exposed to the major climatological influences of the Pacific Ocean, the Caribean Sea and the Amazonian Forest. The present research focuses on the study of the mixing height (an important parameter for dispersion analysis) in the metropolitan region of the Aburr‡ Valley, where, mainly owing to geographical and  topographic factors, the pollutant circulation is weak and the urban air quality is deficient, as can be seen in the records over the last 30 years.