RAIMI Tools Fact Sheet:
Air Modeling	P

(AMP)

Air modeling for risk assessment must consider the
local variability in land use and terrain to address site-
specific fate and transport of airborne contaminants.
Airflow surrounding a release is modified from the
regionally measured meteorological data by local land
features. Processing large data files of
meteorological, land use and terrain information is
time- and computer-intensive, particularly when
assessing releases from hundreds or thousands of
sources.

Additionally, automation of precise implementation
methods ensures consistency among air modeling
analyses. AMP implements automated data pre-processing to prepare source-specific meteorological
and air model source input files accounting for localized variations in site characteristics.

Processing Site-Specific Meteorological Files

AMP is a robust data processing system that prepares a multi-year meteorological file for each source
of contaminant release. With AMP, you can:

•	Process local land use within 3 kilometers of every source to identify the source-specific,
directional and seasonal surface roughness parameters, and determine the
appropriateness of rural or urban air dispersion coefficients

•	Process the regional measurements of meteorological parameters, typically five years, into
a single localized source-specific meteorological file required for input to the air model

Preparing Source Input Files

Sources included in the risk assessment require air model parameters for input to the risk pathways.
Source input files direct the air model to compute air parameter values for acute and chronic risk for
an area within 10 kilometers of each source, based on the unique release parameters of each source.
As the source may emit contaminants in one or more phases, AMP prepares the required source
input files for the air model (ISCST3) that include:

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Key Components

AMP consists of four main components:

•	Define Datasets, a tool to set pathways to view and process datasets

•	Process Site Parameters, a tool that computes and views site parameters for each source

•	Create ADM Files, a tool that:

•	Builds the air model input files (ISCST3) for each source

•	Includes all four contaminant phases (vapor, particle, particle-bound, mercury vapor)

•	Includes universal grid with terrain elevations surrounding each source

•	Process Meteorological Files, a tool that:

•	Uses EPA's Meteorological Processor for Regulatory Modeling (MPRM)

•	Incorporates effects of seasonal land use near source

•	Creates source-specific meteorological files for each year of data

•	Merges multiple years of data into a single file

System Requirements

To run AMP, you need:

•	Windows 98, 2000, XP, ME

•	128Mb RAM (256Mb recommended)

•	200 megabytes of disk space (plus up to 3 Gigabytes of data,

meteorological and source input files)	sfy;v

Additional Information

For additional information on AMP or the RAIMI Program, contact Jeff Yurk,

EPA Region 6, at vurk.ieffrev@epa.gov or via phone at 214-665-8309.

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Four separate input files for each
source and phase (vapor, particle,
particle-bound, and mercury
vapor)

Automatically generated grid node
array (approximately 7000+ grid
nodes) in a universal geographic
grid system spaced every 3 arc-
seconds (60-90 meters) out to 3
kilometers, and every 15 arc-
seconds (300-450 meters) out to
10 kilometers, from each source
location

Automatically extracted terrain
elevations at each grid node from the
USGS 1-degree Digital Elevation Mapping (DEM) data

Specification of acute (1-hour) and chronic (annual) averaging periods to prepare output
plot files

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