Enhanced Turbulent Mixing on Highways

Traffic emissions have a substantial effect on air quality and turbulence affects how these emissions mix with the surrounding air. In July and August of 2010, measurements of turbulent fluxes and turbulent kinetic energy were made on highways in the Toronto area (Ontario, Canada) as part of the ALMITEE (Advancing Local-scale Modeling through Inclusion of Transportation Emission Experiments) subproject FEVER (Fast Evolution of Vehicle Emissions from Roadways). The aim of this project was to study and parameterize the turbulent mixing of traffic emissions on highways as a function of traffic density, speed, and vehicle type. The mobile station CRUISER (Canadian Regional and Urban Investigation System for Environmental Research) was equipped with two sonic anemometers, an air flow probe (AIMMS-20), inertial motion sensing, GPS, video recording equipment, and various particle and gas measurement instrumentation. This allowed in-situ turbulence measurements while driving on the highway with traffic. These measurements differ from previous studies in that turbulence can be measured in realistic conditions, while traffic densities, vehicle types, and vehicle to measurement distances can be extracted from video recording by automated video processing software. Although the turbulent motion of air is often measured from aircraft and ship-based instrumentation, the analysis and interpretation of sonic anemometer measurements from a highway-speed vehicle, moving over uneven and often bumpy terrain presents a very different challenge. Various analytical approaches to process these measurements will be compared and the development of the video processing software to determine vehicle size and following distance will be discussed. Results will be presented which demonstrate a strong dependence of turbulent energy on vehicle type, speed, and following distance.