Analyzing gases of big cities is serious business

Grid computing (technology used in the integration of different computational resources) is going to be used by several South-American countries to monitor the quality of the air in mega-cities.

The infrastructure of this project consists of clusters located in the Centre for Modeling Mathematics, University of Chile, Santiago, and at CPTEC, Cachoeira Paulista (SP), connected to networks Assemble (Chile), RNP (Brazil) and Clara (Latin America). The project is called South American Emissions, Megacities and Climate (Saemc) and the goals are to measure and predict the quality of the air of four cities in South America: Santiago, Buenos Aires, Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro.

The gases that will be analyzed are carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide, nitrous oxide, and aerosol particles from burning and urban and industrial emissions, ozone and its precursors.