What Are the Benefits of ADMS 5?

Initially developed for use by British regulatory authorities, ADMS 5 has proven to be so effective as an air dispersion model that its popularity has since stretched far beyond the UK. It is now favoured by a multitude of government organisations, license holders and private businesses in Europe, Asia, Oceania, North America, Africa and the Middle East.

Of course, ADMS 5 is not only the only modelling software available; in the USA, for example, the Environment Protection Agency (EPA) has developed its own AERMOD Cloud solutions. Why, then, has ADMS 5 proven to be so universally popular across the planet? We take a look at some of its major benefits that set it apart from the competition below.

Modelling options

ADMS 5 has been specifically designed to give its users as much flexibility and control as possible. This means it includes a wide array of customisable options, including condensed plume visibility, dry and wet deposition, fluctuations, impact of surrounding landscape topography, NOx chemistry permutations, odour modelling, puffs, radioactivity decay and time varying sources of emissions. A good deal of these features are simply not available on rival software packages.

Meteorological pre-processor

Of course, the ambient air quality and pollution concentrations surrounding an industrial facility are not just dependent on the emissions it produces, but also the meteorological conditions at the time. These fluctuate on a near-constant basis, which is why ADMS 5 allows for the hourly input of sequential and statistical data of both general and specialist varieties. What’s more, all of the input and output values incurred during the process are automatically recorded on file for posterity.

User-defined outputs

What’s important to one site owner operating in one jurisdiction might be completely different to someone somewhere else. For that reason, ADMS 5 allows users to tweak the output options to serve their needs best, by adjusting the type of pollutant, its averaging time, which exceedance values and percentiles to calculate and whether or not rolling averages are needed. This helps companies comply with the specific standards and methods for environmental monitoring in their area, tightening their operations and avoiding costly fines or penalties.

Visualisation

It’s one thing having access to reams of raw data; it’s quite another to present it in a manner that is intuitively understandable and allows for ease of insight. The ADMS 5 comes equipped with the ADMS Mapper, which can incorporate terrain files for certain countries (including the UK, Ireland France), then display and edit input data and view the results in the shape of colour contour plots. The Mapper is also compatible with other software (such as ArcGIS, MapInfo Professional Geographical Information System and the Surfer contour-plotting package) which can enhance its functionality even further.