Odour Impact Assessment by Means of Dispersion Modeling, Dynamic Olfactometry and Mobile Electronic Nose around Agadir Fishing Port in Morocco

Abstract

Odorous emissions emitted from various sources including industrial and commercial activities have particular concerns about human health. These malodors emissions are an environmental concern that affects health status and social life of the neighbors. That requires the local authority to set up a management strategy to control this nuisance. The evaluation of odour emissions from fishing port is complex because these emissions depend on several factors such as multiple sources of odor emissions, meteorological conditions, topography and others. That imposes the use of complementary approaches to monitor odours. In this paper, the case of Agadir fishing port is studied, which is adjacent to the tourist area and residential neighborhoods and which hosts a number of points that can generate odors. To assess this odour impact, three methods are used such as dynamic olfactometry, dispersion modeling and mobile electronic nose (e-nose). The use of these three methods in a complementary manner to assess odour impacts around a fishing port allowed both the quantification of the emissions using dynamic olfactometry and the evaluation of their impact on the study area with model dispersion. The results enabled also to identify the most affected areas of the city by odor emissions and to recognize the meteorological parameters maximizing odor impact. The other goal of this work is to compare the results of the odour dispersion modeling and e-nose measurements for one year in terms of frequency of overtaking the set alert thresholds over the same period. Comparison highlights the strengths and weaknesses of both approaches. Modeling can be used predicatively but it does not take into account fugitive emissions reliably in the absence of data on these emissions, modeling based on the hourly average misjudges the odor peaks, while e-nose made it possible to obtain validated data and provides accurate, affordable and real-time odour measurement capability tacking in to account the role of human perception without being able to characterize the extent of the odor nuisance caused by each source. We conclude that these three valuation methods provide complementary information about odor nuisance and reasonable estimates of odors.