Analysis of Landscape and Climate
Parameters for Continental Scale
Assessment of the Fate of Pollutants
Alberto Pistocchi
Pilar Vizcaino
David Pennington
IES
2006
EUR 22624 EN
2
The mission of Institute for Environment and Sustainability is to provide scientific
and technical support to the European Union’s policies for protecting the
environment and the EU Strategy for Sustainable Development.
European Commission
Directorate-General Joint Research Centre
Institute for Environment and Sustainability
Contact information
Address:Via E. Fermi 1, TP 460. Ispra (VA). Italy
E-mail: pilar.vizcaino@jrc.it
Tel.: +39 0332 786281
Fax:
http://ies.jrc.cec.eu.int
http://www.jrc.cec.eu.int
Legal Notice
Neither the European Commission nor any person
acting on behalf of the Commission is responsible for
the use which might be made of this publication.
A great deal of additional information on the European Union is available on the
Internet.
It can be accessed through the Europe server
http://europa.eu.int
EUR 22624 EN
ISSN 1018-5593
ISBN 92-79-04809
Luxembourg: Office for Official Publications of the European Communities
© European Communities, 2006
Reproduction is authorised provided the source is acknowledged
Printed in Italy
3
Foreword............................................................................................................................. 4
Introduction......................................................................................................................... 5
Parameter estimation for multimedia fate and transport models ........................................ 6
Atmospheric parameters ................................................................................................... 17
Temperature .................................................................................................................. 17
OH concentration.......................................................................................................... 17
Aerosol concentration in air.......................................................................................... 18
Organic carbon content in aerosol ................................................................................ 19
10 m height wind velocity............................................................................................. 19
Atmospheric mixing height........................................................................................... 19
Land cover characteristics for particle dry deposition velocity.................................... 24
Precipitation, Duration of the wet period...................................................................... 25
Atmospheric transport: Source-receptor relations, Source-receptor time of travel. ..... 26
Surface water parameters.................................................................................................. 30
River discharge Q ......................................................................................................... 30
River slope .................................................................................................................... 32
River width.................................................................................................................... 36
Water velocity, Water depth ......................................................................................... 38
Surface water residence time ........................................................................................ 41
Soil parameters.................................................................................................................. 51
Fraction of topsoil organic carbon ................................................................................ 54
Using soil texture and land cover to predict Runoff, Evapotranspiration, Infiltration . 54
Erosion rate ................................................................................................................... 58
Leaf Area Index (LAI) .................................................................................................. 59
Ocean parameters.............................................................................................................. 62
Seawater mixing depth.................................................................................................. 62
Seawater velocity.......................................................................................................... 62
Seawater temperature.................................................................................................... 62
Suspended solids concentration .................................................................................... 62
Wind speed at 10 m height on oceans........................................................................... 63
Chlorophyll ................................................................................................................... 63
Acknowledgements........................................................................................................... 64
References......................................................................................................................... 65
List of the maps of ALPaCA-Fate .................................................................................... 69
4
Foreword
Increasingly, environmental management requires a capability to assess the spatial
distribution of pollutants implying risks for human health and the ecosystems. Specialist
and disciplinary analysis weakens in favor of crosscutting approaches capable of a
holistic perspective.
To tackle the goal of an integrated description of the fate and transport of contaminants in
the ecosystems and the related risks, at the Institute for Environment and Sustainability
(IES) of the JRC an initiative is going on which has been named FATE after the Fate of
pollutants in Terrestrial and Coastal Ecosystems.
The initiative consists of the systematic integration and pipelining of laboratory and
modeling activities concerning the monitoring and prediction of pollution dynamics in
water, soil and all related environmental media. Through the development of specific
models, the working group of FATE is now in the condition to provide decision support
on a wide range of contamination issues, with particular emphasis for the level of
screening of substances with poor monitoring history and high potential of concern for
human health and ecosystem risks.
The working scales range from Continental Europe, to large catchments, to site-specific
investigations aimed at providing calibration data, benchmark detailed models and
criteria for up scaling.
The decision support tools available include databases and atlases of landscape and
climate parameters, data on exposure pathways, models for the simulation of the fate,
transport and uptake of contaminants along ecological webs and human cohorts, tightly
integrated with sampling, laboratory analysis and interpretation of monitoring data.
The analysis presented here concerns environmental parameters always used in
multimedia fate and transport modeling of contaminants and is aimed at documenting the
information used in the Geographic Information System (GIS)-based MAPPE modeling
strategy, developed within the FATE initiative and other projects involving the IES.
However, the discussion broadens to include issues of concern for all currently used
multimedia models, among which particularly the SIMPLEBOX/EUSES model endorsed
by the European Commission in the context of risk assessment for new and existing
substances. For this reason we hope that the material presented in this report will help
supporting modelers in the choice of environmental parameters for their specific
applications, and therefore contribute to better decisions in line with the Environment and
Health Strategy of the European Commission.
Giovanni Bidoglio
Head,
Rural, Water and
Ecosystem Resources Unit
IES, EC DG JRC
5
Introduction
Landscape and climate variability is a key issue in multimedia environmental modeling.
Predictions of chemicals fate and transport can be highly sensitive to some parameters,
which in turn have high variability both across space and time. Hence it is important to
characterize these parameters, in order to have appropriate information to supply to both
spatially resolved and lumped models.
A broad body of literature exists on the effect of spatial and temporal variability of
landscape parameters on chemical fate and transport model predictions. Although
Hertwich et al., 1999, stress that landscape parameters variability may be of lesser
importance than the uncertainty in emission and chemical properties, other studies using
spatially resolved models indicated that spatial variability may be key under certain
conditions (e.g. Pennington et al., 2005).
From these studies, it appears that evaluations using single default values for landscape
parameters may be satisfactory when interested in small, homogeneous regions, while for
continental or global scale predictions it would be more appropriate to refer to a whole
range of the parameters, by performing e.g. calculations on a sufficiently representative
set of unique combinations. An analysis of the effects of spatial variability when using
the EUSES model (EC, 2004) has been performed with emphasis on the soil component
(Verdelocco, 2004).
In the present contribution, we illustrate a set of landscape and climate parameter maps of
Europe, aimed at providing input to models of both distributed and lumped type. The
parameters are provided in the form of maps, with a conventional spatial resolution of 1
km, and with a temporal resolution of one month whenever applicable. Actual spatial
resolution may be well coarser than 1 km, depending on the data sources; however, as a
number of parameters can be estimated at such resolution, it has been chosen to keep it as
a reference. In future improvements of the data set, data at coarser resolution will be
gradually replaced with finer ones if deemed necessary to improve model predictions.
The data set is presented in the form of an atlas, i.e. a collection of reference maps easy to
consult and to use for predictions with simple lumped models, when one is interested in
making region-specific calculations. Also, the data sets are arranged as grids in the
popular ArcInfo ASCII format, for import in most gridcell-based geographic information
systems (GIS). This allows the use of information in more sophisticated modeling such as
distributed models, and lumped models considering variations.
As an atlas, the data set reflects average conditions in time. Although different data may
often refer to different averaging periods, we don’t have at present consistent estimates
for all parameters throughout.
Inherent in the approach is also the impossibility to provide actual time series of the
parameters. This may be limiting in many applications, but for the fate and transport of
chemicals at continental or global scale overall knowledge of the emissions is still so
weak that often referring to an average intra-annual variation of the landscape and
climate parameters is fully satisfactory.