Fractional derivative models for atmospheric dispersion of pollutants

Abstract

In the present work, we investigate the potential of fractional derivatives to model atmospheric dispersion of pollutants. We propose simple fractional differential equation models for the steady state spatial distribution of concentration of a non-reactive pollutant in Planetary Boundary Layer. We solve these models and we compare the solutions with a real experiment. We found that the fractional derivative models perform far better than the traditional Gaussian model and even better than models found in the literature where it is considered that the diffusion coefficient is a function of the position in order to deal with the anomalous diffusion.