Description: The Journal of Physical Chemistry B DOI: 10.1021/acs.jpcb.5b03558

Description: Energies, Vol. 10, Pages 2136: Estimating Human Health Impacts and Costs Due to Iranian Fossil Fuel Power Plant Emissions through the Impact Pathway Approach Energies doi: 10.3390/en10122136 Authors: Mojtaba Jorli Steven Van Passel Hossein Sadeghi Alireza Nasseri Lotfali Agheli Air pollutants from fossil fuel fired power plants harm the environment and human health. More than 91% of Iran’s electricity production is from thermal power plants that use natural gas, diesel, and fuel oil. We apply the impact pathway approach to estimate the health impacts arising from Iranian fossil-based electricity generation emission, and in a next step, we calculate monetary costs of the estimated damages, for a one-year period starting from 20 March 2016 through 2017. We use the new version of SIMPACTS (International Atomic Energy Agency, Vienna, Austria) to investigate the health effects from 61 major Iran fossil-based power plants separately. The selected plants represent 95.6% of total Iran fossil-based power generation. Using the individual and different power plant estimates, we avoid extrapolation and our results can be considered more reliable, taking into account spatial differences. The total damage cost is 723.42 million USD (2000). The damage cost per generated electricity varies from 0.06 to 22.41 USD/MWh and average plant damage cost is 2.85 USD/MWh. Accounting for these external costs indicates the actual costs of fossil energy. The results are useful for policy makers to compare the health costs from these plants and to decide on cleaner energy sources and to take measures to increase benefits for society.

Description: P-band radar remote sensing applied during the Airborne Microwave Observatory of Subcanopy and Subsurface (AirMOSS) mission has shown great potential for estimation of root zone soil moisture. When retrieving the soil moisture profile (SMP) from P-band radar observations, a mathematical function describing the vertical moisture distribution is required. Because only a limited number of observations are available, the number of free parameters of the mathematical model must not exceed the number of observed data. For this reason, an empirical quadratic function (second order polynomial) is currently applied in the AirMOSS inversion algorithm to retrieve the SMP. The three free parameters of the polynomial are retrieved for each AirMOSS pixel using three backscatter observations (i.e., one frequency at three polarizations of Horizontal-Horizontal, Vertical-Vertical and Horizontal-Vertical). In this paper, a more realistic, physically-based SMP model containing three free parameters is derived, based on a solution to Richards’ equation for unsaturated flow in soils. Evaluation of the new SMP model based on both numerical simulations and measured data revealed that it exhibits greater flexibility for fitting measured and simulated SMPs than the currently applied polynomial. It is also demonstrated that the new SMP model can be reduced to a second order polynomial at the expense of fitting accuracy.

Description: Separation of light olefin/paraffin mixtures having the same carbon number is one of the most energy intensive separation processes in petrochemical industry. Gas/liquid membrane contactors as an alternative to conventional processes have gained increasing interest due to low energy consumption. A two-dimensional comprehensive model was developed to predict the transport and chemical absorption of propylene in a co-current microporous membrane contactor in the current study. Formation of complex between propylene and silver ion, and silver nitrate dissolution were considered in the developed model. Model findings showed that increasing absorbent rate does not have significant effect on propylene absorption flux while the enhancement of gas flow rate decreases the efficiency of system due to the reduction of propylene residence time inside the contactor. The results also revealed that as absorbent goes up in the tube, both propylene and complex penetrate more deeply in the liquid and a diffusion layer is formed near the gas-liquid interface.

Description: Quantitative distributions of major functional PFTs of the world ocean improve the understanding of the role of marine phytoplankton in the global marine ecosystem and biogeochemical cycles. Chl-a fluorescence gives insight on the health of phytoplankton and is related to phytoplankton biomass. In this study, global ocean color satellite products of different dominant phytoplankton functional types' (PFTs') biomass and chlorophyll fluorescence retrieved from hyperspectral satellite data using Differential Optical Absorption Spectroscopy applied to phytoplankton (PhytoDOAS) are presented (see also Bracher et al. 2009, Sadeghi et al. 2012a). Data are compared to ocean color products from multispectral sensors and application of the hyperspectral data set in studying phytoplankton dynamics are presented (Sadeghi et al. 2012b, Ying et al. 2012). Although current hyperspectral sensors have poor spatial resolution (〉30kmx30km), they are useful for the verification and improvement of the high spatially resolved multi-spectral ocean color products. Future applications of PhytoDOAS retrieval to other hyperspectral sensors and its synergistic use with information gained from multispectral ocean color sensors are proposed.

Description: In order to understand the marine phytoplanktons role in the global marine ecosystem and on biogeochemical fluxes, it is necessary to derive simultaneously global information on the quantitative distribution of major phytoplankton functional groups of the world ocean. We show global biomass distributions from 2008 of diatoms and cyanobacteria analysed with PhytoDOAS, a method of Differential Optical Absorption Spectroscopy (DOAS) currently specialized for diatoms and cyanobacteria (Bracher et al. 2009) from satellite data of SCIAMACHY (Scanning Imaging Absorption Spectrometer for Atmospheric Cartography) on ENVISAT. In addition, first results from an extension of the PhytoDOAS method to simultaneous phytoplankton group fitting lead to global biomass distributions of other phytoplantkon types, such as coccolithophores, Phaeocystis sp., and dinoflagellates. These global maps of phytoplankton distribution are validated with collocated pigment water samples analyzed via HPLC and the calculated phytoplankton groups applying the CHEMTAX program (Mackey et al. 1996). The satellite based diatoms and cyanobacteria data sets are used as input data for global ecosystem and biogeochemical models. First applications of these approaches will be presented.

Description: The goal of this study is to improve the retrieval method of identification of major Phytoplankton Functional Types (PFTs) using ocean-color data provided by a high spectrally-resolved satellite sensor, SCIAMACHY(Scanning Imaging Absorption Spectrometer for Atmospheric Cartography) on board ENVISAT. The method under improvement, so-called Phyto-DOAS, is an extended exploitation of DOAS (Differential Optical Absorption Spectroscopy), originally developed to retrieve atmospheric trace gases, into remote identification of oceanic phytoplankton.The main challenge for retrieving a specific Phytoplankton target by Phyto-DOAS is to overcome the overlapping effects of different PFTs absorption spectra which are living -in different ratios- together with that target in ocean waters. Phytoplankton absorption spectra are specified by the types and concentrations of pigment assemblages they are composed of and the mentioned correlation effect is due to common pigments among different PFTs, e.g., Chl-a. So far Phyto-DOAS has been successfully exploited to identify Cyanobacteria and Diatom over global ocean (Bracher et al. 2009).In this study two ideas have been implemented for the purpose of PFTs retrieval improvement: firstly using the method of fourth-derivative spectroscopy (Aguirre-Gomez et al. 1995) some spectral analysis are done to reach the peak positions of main pigment components in each absorption spectrum. Then comparing the results of major PFTs the optimized fit-window for DOAS-retrieval of each PFT is determined. Secondly the simultaneous fitting of different PFTs have been implemented (over the year 2008) to include the real oceanic situation more into the retrieval. In this step the provided optimized fit-windows have been tested for better results. Validation of the global ocean results have been followed using several in-situ data sets obtained through several cruises of Polarstern research vessel in the year 2008.

Description: In this study an extended Differential Optical Absorption Spectroscopy (DOAS) method for the retrieval of major phytoplankton functional types (PFT) from satellite measurements utilizing hyper spectral instruments like SCIAMACHY (Scanning Imaging Absorption Spectrometer for Atmospheric Cartography) and GOME-2 (Global Ozone Measurement Experiment 2) is introduced. Phytoplankton consists of different pigment assemblages. Thus light absorption of phytoplankton types depends strongly on the concentration and composition of different pigments. Due to spectral overlapping of phytoplankton pigment absorption the influence of particular pigment is not obvious. Here, measured phytoplankton absorption spectra are decomposed by using a high order derivative method (Aguirre-Gomez et al. 1995). The weightings of the composition of the pigment absorption peaks are correlated with results from taxonomic pigment analysis. This analysis shows the potential of high order derivatives in resolving the spectral absorption features of the component pigments present in different PFTs.By using these weightings in a specialized PhytoDOAS retrieval technique (Bracher et al. 2009), a higher sensitivity to retrieve PFTs is expected. Examples of first retrieval results shows the applicability of these improvements to PhytoDOAS method.