We kindly invite you to the Miklós Farkas Seminar

           03 October (Thursday) 10.15, BME, H306

Zahari Zlatev (Aarchus University, Roskilde, Denmark)

Using climatic scenarios in advanced air pollution studies

Systems of non-linear partial differential equations (PDEs) are often used to describe mathematically the long-range transport of air pollutants. The discretization of the spatial derivatives involved in these systems of PDEs leads to the solution of large systems of non-linear ordinary differential equations (ODEs), which are very stiff and, therefore, must be handled by applying implicit numerical methods for solving systems of ODEs. That leads to the solution of systems of non-linear algebraic equations, which have to be treated, at every time-step, by suitable iterative methods. Some version of the well-known Newton Iterative Method is normally used and systems of linear algebraic equations (LAEs) are to be solved many times in the inner loop of the Newton procedure. The systems of LAEs are huge when fine spatial resolution is used, which is nearly always highly desirable. Moreover, many such systems are to be treated, because the time-interval is nearly always very long. Handling many millions of systems of LAE’s, each of which contain several hundred million equations, is not unusual. Therefore, such complex models have necessarily to be run on high-performance computers by applying special techniques; see, for example, Z. Zlatev and I. Dimov: “Computational and Numerical Challenges in Environmental Modelling”, Studies in Computational Mathematics, Vol. 13, Elsevier, Amsterdam, 2006. The problems are becoming much more difficult and time-consuming when large-scale air pollution models (a) are used to study the sensitivity of the pollution levels to variations of some key parameters as, for example, the emissions and (b) are combined with different climatic scenarios in the efforts to investigate the influence of climatic changes on some high and harmful pollution levels. The treatment of the air pollution models in this extremely difficult situation will be discussed in this talk. It will, furthermore, be shown that the climatic changes are normally resulting in increased levels of some pollutants. However, the major aim will be to demonstrate the fact that some of these enormous computational tasks cannot be handled directly even on the fastest parallel computers. Therefore, some special techniques, fast numerical methods and appropriate splitting procedures must necessarily be used.