Colls J. Air Pollution

2nd edition. — Spoon press, 2002. — 577 p. — ISBN: 0-203-47602-6, 0-203-78426-XAir pollution has been with us since the first fire was lit, although different aspects have been important at different times. On the small scale, point source releases of individual pollutants can cause localised responses ranging from annoyance to physical injury. In urban areas, high concentrations of gases and particles from coal combustion and, more recently, motor vehicles have produced severe loss of air quality and significant health effects. On a regional scale, tropospheric ozone formation and acid deposition have been the major threats.
Finally, emissions of carbon dioxide and other radiatively active gases, together with stratospheric ozone depletion, represent planet-scale assaults on the quality of our atmospheric environment.
This book is designed to cover the whole gamut of air pollution issues from a quantitative standpoint. In Chapters 1 and 2, the major sources of gaseous and particulate air pollution, together with an outline of possible control measures, are described. Mobile sources, which have taken over from stationary ones as the major threat to local air quality, get their own space in Chapter 3.
Chapter 4 describes the most widely-used methods for measuring these pollutants. The temporal and geographical variations of concentrations and deposition on a national and international scale are outlined in Chapter 5.
Once released, the effects of these pollutants depend critically on their dilution during dispersion, a process which is covered in Chapter 6.
Chapter 7 gives an extended example of the data processing techniques that can be used to extract different types of information from a set of air pollution measurements. Although people tend to associate air quality, or the lack of it, with the outdoors, most of us spend most of our lives indoors, and specific aspects of this specialised environment are highlighted in Chapter 8.
The effects of air pollution on plants, animals, materials and visual range are described in Chapters 9 and 10, and the recent issues of climate change and ozone depletion in Chapters 11 and 12.
Finally, the effects of pollutants on the environment have led to a wide variety of standards and legislation for their control, and these are reviewed in Chapter 13.
This book is aimed at a wide target audience – much of the material has been taught on both undergraduate and taught Masters programmes at Nottingham to students from a wide range of academic backgrounds.