Accounting for plume rise of aircraft emissions and shoreline meteorology enhances AERMOD’s description of concentrations measured around Los Angeles airport

The Aviation Environmental Design Tool (AEDT), developed by the FAA, is used to analyze the environmental impact of airport activities on air quality and noise near airports. AEDT incorporates AERMOD to estimate concentrations resulting from aircraft emissions, which possess horizontal momentum as well as buoyancy. The current version (v23132) of AERMOD incorporates plume dynamics associated with such emissions as an ALPHA option, which is described in Pandey et al. (2023). AERMET, AERMOD's meteorological processor does not account for the meteorology of the land-water interface that is likely to be important for airports located on the shorelines of lakes or oceans. An approach to include these effects in AERMOD is described in Pandey et al. (2022). This study examines the impact of including plume rise and shoreline effects in AERMOD by evaluating model estimates of NO