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Exoplasmic t1_j8x00iv wrote

Reply to comment by crimeo in HYSPLIT Air Dispersion model depicting the potential transport of chemical plumes emitted by the East Palestine Chemical Disaster [Ohio]. Simulating February 3-7, 2023 [OC] by apathyEndsNow

You don’t need to know exactly what it is. You need a mass emission rate. Granted there’s some guess work. You know the mass leaked. You can guess % burned. But you still have to know % combined with oxygen. Still whatever compounds produced by burning are going to be really nasty. The were some fixed site monitors upwind that measured pretty high polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs). I beg there were some chlorinated ones too. The just like regular PAHs, chlorinated PAHs are going to be around for a long time but longer. And Cl-PAHs are going to more toxic and there’s not a lot of good data to derive health benchmarks. We’re going to have to see what diseases pop up for people and ecosystems.

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crimeo t1_j8xbv1f wrote

You should definitely need to know the temperature "Burning hot right out of a fire" or "cold, evaporated" is going to change the elevation and which wind patterns it is in by hundreds, thousands of meters...

Just labeling that alone would be great, because then from the chart of what was in the tankers and what burned and what didn't, etc, we could estimate what it is a plume of ourselves.

> The were some fixed site monitors upwind that measured pretty high polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs).

That seems way more interesting than this chart here (just in general, downwind readings make more sense for what people would care about, and skips right over the question of what the stuff is...), do you have a link for this?

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