There has been a few changes recently that will probably have a positive effect on the frequency of release of the CALPUFF versions. The company Exponent has got control of CALPUFF along with the CALPUFF web site (www.src.com). The switchover of the domain name occurred last week and on Wednesday the Exponent web site became live.
CALPUFF is a US EPA Guideline model for all applications > 50km, it is also the guideline model for all near-field applications where the steady state assumption does not apply, i.e., complex terrain and complex meteorological environments (Sea breeze, boundary layers etc.). By being a US EPA Guideline model the model has to be freely available to all users. This includes all the source code and every change or addition done to the model.
Mainly due to be an “open source” and free project the CALPUFF model has undergone a significant peer review and other countries in the world have adopted it as their own. It took about 15 years to get it accepted as a guideline model for regulatory applications, and it is quite often used as a reference model for assessing odour impact.
As an introduction to understand the changes that recently happened in the development of CALPUFF, we should go back more or less 30 years ago to the origins of the group that started this project: The Atmospheric Studies Group (ASG).
The history
The ASG group was a core part of the company Sigma Research Corp (SRC). Now you know why the name of the website to download the model ;-).
The CALPUFF model was originally developed by the SRC in the late 1980s under contract with the California Air Resources Board and it was first issued in 1990. SRC subsequently became part of Earth Tech, Inc. At that time, the first Graphical User Interface (GUI) was released to help people use more efficiently the model.
After the US EPA designated CALPUFF as a preferred model in their Guideline on Air Quality Models, the company Earth Tech served as the designated distributor of the model. In April 2006, ownership of the model switched from Earth Tech to the TRC Environmental Corporation, who were then responsible for maintaining and distributing the model. In April 2011 the ASG, a group at that time formed by 14 scientists and meteorologists, moved to the company Exponent, however TRC Environmental retained the copyright of the model and hence the SRC website remained with them.
The development
There has not been many updates since then. The US EPA recently approved an update of CALMET and CALPUFF from Version 5.8 to Version 5.8.4.
Regarding odours, Version 6 of CALPUFF (not EPA-approved) is the only one so far that includes options to use sub-hourly time steps for both meteorological and emissions data and nested grid capabilities.
CALPUFF and Odors Training Course - 22-25 October 2013, in Madrid. |
To my knowledge this might be due to the move of the core ASG people to Exponent, but this is just an hypothesis and we should ask to the people involved on that movement. The fact is that TRC had the copyright of the model, but there was not many people there left to manage it and improve it.
I know that meanwhile the ASG in Exponent has been busy working in the development of CALPUFF and writing a new GUI for a new version of CALPUFF that will work on all machines (including 64 bit Win7 and Win8 machines). The name of the GUI is CALApps.
For those of you that are not familiar with the software, I have to mention that so far just CALMET, CALPUFF and CALPOST does not work on a Windows 7 64 bit machine, but the other utilities of the model still do.
CALApps is just a GUI that makes easier to work with CALPUFF. According to the developers, the difference with other GUIs is that CALApps will be free and downloadable from the Exponent website. In addition, now the executables can be bundled with the CALApps GUI, which will make things much simpler in terms of getting new versions from my point of view.
Free copies of the CALApps software have been distributed to the participants of the CALPUFF odour specialty courses organized by olores.org and Exponent in Spain and Chile. Anyway, it is a good idea to register as a CALPUFF user on their website as any technical upgrades, developments and the release of the new GUI will be posted there.
If you find this article interesting, you might be also interested in these articles.
- Preliminary Program of the First Seminar on Odour Management 2014
- A new CALPUFF update by the US EPA recently published
- CALPUFF and Odours Training Course Insights
- CALPUFF and Odors Training Course - 22-25 October 2013, in Madrid.
- Odour impact of a new waste management plant: zero-situation characterised by VDI3940 field observations and predictive odour assessment by CALPUFF modelling
