Abstract: The Aviation Environmental Design Tool (AEDT), developed by the FAA, is used to analyze the environmental impact of airport activities on air quality and noise near airports. AEDT incorporates AERMOD to estimate concentrations resulting from aircraft emissions, which possess horizontal momentum as well as buoyancy. The current version (v23132) of AERMOD incorporates plume dynamics associated with such emissions for users as an ALPHA option, which is described in Pandey et al. (2023). AERMET, AERMOD’s meteorological processor does not account for the meteorology of the land-water interface that is likely to be important for airports located on the shorelines of lakes or oceans. Recently, Pandey et al. (2023 and 2022) included these effects in AERMOD. This study provides an in-depth understanding of the contribution of aircraft activity to NOX and SO2 measurements collected during the Los Angeles Airport Air Quality Source Apportionment Study (AQSAS) in the winter and summer of 2012. We further provide an examination of the impact of these modifications to plume rise and meteorological inputs on the performance of AERMOD in describing these NOX and SO2 measurements collected during the Los Angeles Airport Air Quality Source Apportionment Study (AQSAS) conducted during the winter and summer of 2012. The performance statistics resulting from this model evaluation indicate that AERMOD improves upon the performance of the current version of the model when it is modified to account for 1) plume rise of aircraft emissions, and (2) shoreline effects on meteorological inputs of AERMOD.

Keywords: AERMOD, Airport, LTO Emissions, Performance Evaluation, Plume Rise, Shoreline Meteorology