The Vertical Transport of Air Pollutants by Convective Clouds. Part I: A Non-Reactive Cloud Transport Model

A convective cloud transport model, without chemical processes, is developed by joining a set of concentration conservative equations into a two-dimensional, slab-symmetric and fully elastic numerical cloud model, and a numerical experiment is completed to simulate the vertical transport of ground-borne, inert gaseous pollutant by deepthunderstorm. The simulation shows that deep convective storm can very effectively transport high concentrated pollutant gas from PBL upward to the upper troposphere in 30 to 40 minutes, where the pollutant spreads laterally outward with strong anvil outflow, forming an extensive high concentration area. Meanwhile, relatively low concentration areas are formed in PBL both below and beside the cloud, mainly caused by dynamic pumping effect and sub-cloud downdraft flow. About 80% of the pollutant gas transported to the upper troposphere is from the layer below 1.5 km AGL (above ground level).