Thesis (M.Sc.) - Cairo University - Faculty of Science - Department of Biophysics

The highly populated Greater Cairo (GC) region suffers from severe air quality issues caused by high levels of anthropogenic activities, such as motorized traffic, industries, and agricultural biomass burning events, along with natural sources of particulate matter, such as wind erosion of arid surfaces. The present thesis aims at studying environmental pollution and its effect on public health along with validating the numerical model 2RegCM-CHEM43. The emission patterns of some major air pollutants, e.g., particulate matter (PM10), sulfur dioxide (SO₂), and surface ozone (O₃) and its precursor{u2019}s gases (nitrogen dioxides, NO₂; carbon monoxide, CO), measured by several pollution stations distributed around GC were analyzed, and the online integrated regional climate chemistry model 2RegCM-CHEM43 was used to simulate the air quality over GC region. Evaluation of the model performance was done through calculation of the bias between the model results and the measured data in order to assess its ability in reproducing the chemical species over the area. Some pollutants concentrations were found to exceed remarkably the Egyptian legal exposure limits during the period of measurement in some industrial areas.The model was found to reproduce the seasonal cycle of the pollutants successfully, but with a large underestimation of the PM10 values. Validation of the RegCMCHEM4 indicated that the emissions inventories of mobile sources and anthropogenic activities need to be improved according to the local activities in order to enhance air quality simulations over GC region

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