SCENARIO I OF STATISTICAL DATA PRECISION AND NUMERICAL PREDICTION OF A GAUSSIAN PLUME POLLUTANT DISPERSION DURING FLY OVER CONSTRUCTION IN PORT-HARCOURT ENVIRONS USING COMPUTATIONAL METHOD

Abstract

We have adopted an alternative method to study the prediction of the pollutant spread at various height and its conservation from the total amount of pollutant emitted. This challenging problem was tackled in this study using computational approached using the Gaussian Plume Model. From the results obtained in study area 1, the plume center of mass (plume center line height) which is the mean pollutant concentrations is recorded as P=0.9217, the vertical height variance is recorded as V=0.0291, the vertical height standard deviation is recorded as I=0.1706, the total amount of pollutant emitted is recorded as Q1=23 and the nominal plume spread is recorded as d=0.7334. From the result obtained from our numerical simulation using MATLAB ODE45 numerical scheme, , we observed that at a distance slightly above the ground level at 0.9Km, the actual concentration measured from field data is recorded as 55.0µg/m³ against the simulated concentration predicted with the Gaussian Plume Model which was recorded as 53.3497µg/m³ which gives a negligible variation with absolute deviation value of 0.03units. In the same scenario, data points with similar trends such a s distance at 0.8Km, 1.0Km, 1.3Km, and 0.6Km with negligible absolute deviation and low percentage error should be considered as valid data points since they fall within the acceptable error interval of .