Urban Population Exposure to Particulate Air Pollution Induced by Road Transport

In the last years, there has been an increase of scientific studies confirming that long- and short-term exposure to particulate matter pollution leads to adverse health effects. The determination of accumulated human exposure in urban areas (in the present study focused on Lisbon) is the main objective of the current work combining information on concentrations at different microenvironments and population timeactivity pattern data. A link between a mesoscale meteorological model and a local scale model (Computational Fluid Dynamics’ based) was developed to define the boundary conditions for the local scale application. The time-activity pattern of the population was derived from statistical information for different sub-population groups and linked to digital city maps. Finally, the hourly PM10 concentrations for indoor and outdoor microenvironments were estimated for the Lisbon city centre based on the local scale air quality model application for a chosen day.