Air pollution is a growing problem in mega (and in the increasing number of secondary) cities in developing countries. Policy makers recognize the need for an integrated air quality management (IAQM) framework. Such a framework is especially helpful for city planning and decision making, in response to the growing civic demand for clean air.
A majority of the existing tools for IAQM are complex and data-intensive. There is a need to develop an organized knowledge base to feed into a robust decision support tool that takes into account the various institutional and technical challenges in developing countries.
The main objective of SIM-air is to make use the best available information to arrive at estimates of key parameters (e.g. emissions from various sources) and simulate the interactions between emissions, dispersion, impacts, and management options in an environmental and economic context.
A one-page writeup on the SIM-air model
SIM-air V1.3: (last updated April, 2009) - is a demo tool which allows for 1-year snapshot analysis for a city or region divied into a 5x5 domain. The tool is updated to calculate the emissions for five sectors - transport, industry, residential, fugitive, and garbage burning, along with the concentration maps of primary and secondary, health impacts analysis, and optimization of options. The new version also allows for analysis of PM2.5 and PM10 simultaneously, to customize for local needs.
[Download SIM-air V1.3] [Manual]
SIM-air V2.0: Allows for two baseline and one control scenario analysis simultaneously [Download]
Applications of SIM-air across cities in Asia, Africa, and Latin America
