The Air Quality Section of the Ministry of Environment uses air quality modelling to simulate how air pollutants disperse in the ambient atmosphere in order to help manage the air quality in the province. The models are used to estimate the impact of air pollutants emitted from emission sources, and are typically employed to determine whether existing or new proposed industrial facilities are or will be in compliance with the ambient air quality standards outlined in Table 20 of the province’s Environmental Code, June 1, 2015 under The Environmental Management and Protection Act, 2010.

The information needed to run dispersion models consists primarily of emissions and meteorological data. Five years (2012-2016) of preprocessed meteorological datasets in an AERMOD ready format is publicly available. This file is contained in the downloadable zipped file. The zipped file contains five files: the SFC and PFL files are the AERMOD ready files required to run AERMOD (i.e., date, sensible heat flux, frictional velocity, potential temperature gradient, vertical velocity, mixing height, monin-obukhov length, surface roughness, Bowen ratio, albedo, scalar wind speed, wind direction, ambient temperature, precipitation, precipitation rate, relative humidity, surface pressure, and total cloud amounts); the DAT file contains the land use information (i.e., Surface roughness, Bowen ratio and albedo) chosen for each month in the SFC file; the KMZ file contains the wind rose for that location which can be used on Google Earth; and the PNG file contains various graphs of monthly or diurnal meteorological distribution (i.e., temperature, wind speed, daytime mixing heights and sensible heat flux, and stability) which can be used to help determine if that location is representative of the area proposed for modelling.