Special Issue for the Australia-Taiwan Joint Symposium on Environmental Modelling

The Australia–Taiwan Joint Symposium on Environmental Modelling took place between 28 and 30 June 2000 in Tunghai University, Taiwan. The objectives of the symposium were to bring together a selection of Australian and Taiwan research organisations to present their latest research findings and to initiate collaboration between Australian and Taiwan scientists on environmental modelling, software and management. About 60 papers were presented in the symposium and the standard of the presentations was very high. Some of the problems addressed in the symposium are common to Australia and Taiwan, such as air quality, severe weather events and climate change, while others have strong regional characteristics, such as urban air pollution in Taiwan and land-use sustainability in Australia. Topics related to sustainable development and environmental management were also discussed. We have selected 10 papers presented in the symposium and compiled this special issue for Environmental Modelling & Software. As in many major Asian cities and/or industrialized regions, air quality in Taiwan is of major concern. Four papers are devoted to this topic, representing different approaches to the problem. K.Y. Liu et al. applied a high-resolution air-pollution modelling system to study the impacts of sea/land breeze on the ozone distribution in northern Taiwan. They successfully simulated the local flow patterns that are influenced both by sea/land and mountain-valley circulations. These circulations play a significant role in the distribution of ozone and the transport of ozone from the urban to the coastal and mountainous areas. Carras et al. presented airborne observations for the Hong-Kong region. Their data provided a valuable validation for an air-quality assessment and prediction system which consists of modules for weather prediction and air-chemistry, an emissions inventory database and a graphical user interface. Carras et al. also presented data on other pollutants that are of interest with respect to the formation of photochemical smog. The study of C.M. Liu is concerned with air-quality assessment using 8-hourly average of O3 and 24-hourly average of PM2.5 concentrations as indicators, as newly proposed by the US EPA. He calculated