Pollution Simulations and in-Field Measurements Performed in March at Longyearbyen, Spitzbergen

Abstract

Spitzbergen is Norway’s largest island, located in the Svalbard archipelago of the Polar Circle region. The island’s population is currently about two and a half thousand, and it works mainly in natural resource extraction, tourism, and scientific research. The subject of our interest is the town of Longyearbyen, the capital of Spitzbergen, with a population of about 1,800. It has an airport and, until recently, the only power plant in Norway that generated electricity by burning coal. The coal has been replaced recently with diesel generators to reduce the pollution output, but the problem is still there. In this paper, we present the hypergraph grammar-based model of mesh generation and finite element pollution propagation simulations at Svalbard at Spitzbergen. We also perform in-field pollution measurements with snowmobiles. The simulations and measurements have been performed in March 2024. We compare our simulation results with in-field measurements.