At the 7^th Modeling Conference held on June 28-29, 2000 in Washington, DC, the US EPA proposed AERMOD as a refined model for regulatory applications in simple and complex terrain.

The AERMOD model has been developed by the American Meteorological Society/Environmental Protection Agency Regulatory Model Improvement Committee (AERMIC), with major contractual support from PES. This development effort, which began in 1991, was undertaken to introduce state-of-the-art modeling concepts into the EPA's air quality models. The focus of AERMIC was on upgrading regulatory steady-state plume modeling to incorporate air dispersion based on planetary boundary layer turbulence structure and scaling concepts, including treatment of both surface and elevated sources, and both simple and complex terrain.

PES has supported the AERMOD development effort since 1993, including the development, testing, and documentation of the AERMOD code, evaluation of the AERMOD modeling system on a total of 10 data bases, and performing a meteorological data degradation analysis.  PES recently completed the implementation and evaluation of the improved building downwash algorithms from the ISC-PRIME model into AERMOD.

The AERMOD modeling system consists of three separate components: AERMOD (AERMIC Dispersion Model), AERMET (AERMOD Meteorological Preprocessor), and AERMAP (AERMOD Terrain Preprocessor). You can download the current versions of the AERMOD modeling system here, including source code, executable, test case, and user’s guide:

AERMOD - Version 99351 (1.0 Mb)

AERMET - Version 99211 (1.3 Mb)

AERMAP - Version 99211 (1.8 Mb)

For more information on the AERMOD modeling system, visit PES’ Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) on AERMOD, or contact PES at aermod@rtp.pes.com.