This book has a dual objective: first to introduce the reader to some of the most important and widespread environmental issues of the day; and second to illustrate the vital role played by mathematical models in investigating these issues. The subjects covered are ground water contamination, air pollution, and hazardous materials emergencies. These issues are presented in their full real-world context and are used to develop important classical mathematical themes. The emphasis throughout is on fundamental principles and concepts, not on achieving technical mastery of state-of-the-art models.

Finishing this book is giving me a mixture of relief, satisfaction and frus tration. Relief, for the completion of a project that has taken too many of my evenings and weekends and that, in the last several months, has become almost an obsession. Satisfaction, for the optimistic feeling that this book, in spite of its many shortcomings and imbalances, will be of some help to the air pollution scientific community. Frustration, for the impossibility of incorporating newly available material that would require another major review of several key chap ters - an effort that is currently beyond my energies but not beyond my desires. The first canovaccio of this book came out in 1980 when I was invited by Computational Mechanics in the United Kingdom to give my first Air Pollution Modeling course. The course material, in the form of transparencies, expanded, year after year, thus providing a growing working basis. In 1985, the ECC Joint Research Center in Ispra, Italy, asked me to prepare a critical survey of mathe matical models of atmospheric pollution, transport and deposition. This support gave me the opportunity to prepare a sort of "first draft" of the book, which I expanded in the following years.

"The combination of scientific and institutional integrity represented by this book is unusual. It should be a model for future endeavors to help quantify environmental risk as a basis for good decisionmaking." â€"William D. Ruckelshaus, from the foreword. This volume, prepared under the auspices of the Health Effects Institute, an independent research organization created and funded jointly by the Environmental Protection Agency and the automobile industry, brings together experts on atmospheric exposure and on the biological effects of toxic substances to examine what is knownâ€"and not knownâ€"about the human health risks of automotive emissions.

"Models are often the only way of interpreting measurements to in vestigate long-range transport, and this is the reason for the emphasis on them in many research programs". B. E. A. Fisher: "A review of the processes and models of long-range transport of air pollutants", Atmospheric Environment, 17(1983), p. 1865. Mathematical models are (potentially, at least) powerful means in the efforts to study transboundary transport of air pollutants, source-receptor relationships and efficient ways of reducing the air pollution to acceptable levels. A mathematical model is a complicated matter, the development of which is based on the use of (i) various mechanisms describing mathematically the physical and chemical properties of the studied phenomena, (ii) different mathematical tools (first and foremost, partial differenti al equations), (iii) various numerical methods, (iv) computers (especially, high-speed computers), (v) statistical approaches, (vi) fast and efficient visualization and animation techniques, (vii) fast methods for manipulation with huge sets of data (input data, intermediate data and output data).

This volume contains a cross-section of the papers presented at the International Symposium on Mathematical Modelling of Ecological, Environmental and Biological Systems held in Kanpur, India, in August 1985. The choice of topics emphasizes many aspects of ecological and environmental matters including air and water pollution, ecotoxicology, resource management, epidemiology, and population and community ecology.It is intended that this volume will focus international attention upon some problems in the ecological and environmental sciences that can be impacted by mathematical modelling and analysis.

Proceedings of the Millennium NATO/CCMS International Technical Meeting on Air Pollution Modeling and its Application, held May 15-19 in Boulder, Colorado. This volume is the latest in a series of proceedings dating back to 1971. The book addresses the problem of air pollution and reports the latest findings and developments in air pollution modeling, from a truly international list of contributors.