Cost Action Es1006. Evaluation, Improvement and Guidance of Local-Scale Emergency Prediction and Response Tools for Airborne Hazards in Built Environments: Ongoing Activities, Experiments and Recent Results

Abstract

The COST Action ES1006 is mainly aimed at evaluating and improving the reliability of neighbourhood- scale emergency response tools on the basis of a comprehensive, concerted and harmonized cross- national approach. The main focus is the evaluation of the air dispersion models, when used in urban or industrial environments with complex building structures, and their integration in emergency response systems. In the frame of this research, three working groups are carrying out several activities such as: to inventory models, tools and methodologies currently applied in the context of emergency management and local-scale threat reduction; to categorize and characterize local-scale threat scenarios; to identify the main gaps, deficiencies and limitations in presently available knowledge and models and to determine the directions for the development of the next generation of models; to test and evaluate available models by model inter-comparison and by comparison against test data from qualified field and laboratory experiments. The ongoing activities in the three WGs and the latest available results will be presented.