23 Mar 2026Booking is now open for the ADMS User Group Meetings, 11-12 November 2026, Manchester

You can now book your tickets for the 2026 ADMS User Group Meetings, which will be held at voco Manchester on 11th and 12th November.

• ADMS 6 User Group Meeting, 11th November
• ADMS-Urban and Roads User Group Meeting, 12th November

The annual ADMS User Group Meetings are a great opportunity to hear the latest ADMS model news and advice from CERC consultants and model developers, to hear talks by model users about their own applications of the software, and to network with other model users.

Tickets are available to order through Eventbrite until 23:30 on Monday 26th October. Organisations with a valid software support contract are entitled to one or more tickets free of charge depending on the type of licence held. The draft programme will be published in the summer.

6 Mar 2026Modelling data centres in ADMS 6 - free upgrade to 1000 point sources

CERC first released ADMS in 1994, and much has changed since then. Computers are more powerful, disc space more plentiful and the modelling requirements of users have changed. After listening to the feedback during the 2025 ADMS UGM, we have revisited ADMS 6's 'point' source limit.

Anyone attending the UGM will have noted that data centres were a hot topic. Modelling data centres demands the inclusion of hundreds of point sources, and the current default licence limit is proving too restrictive. We are therefore increasing the default from 300 to 1000 in the next ADMS 6 release, due in late Spring / early summer 2026.

However, there is no need to wait for that release if you are finding the current point source count is holding you back. For any user with support, simply get in touch with us, giving your licence details, and we will issue you with an upgraded licence, free of charge.

We are working hard on ADMS 6.1 right now. As well as increasing the number of point sources, we are also adding functionality for determining the probability of exceeding air pollution limits for sources which are only on for a limited number of hours, such as back-up generators supporting data centres. Details on this and more will be given as we progress towards the next ADMS release.

Hint: If you select Contact helpdesk from the Help menu in ADMS, it will pre-fill a new email for you with the relevant licence information we need, so you don’t need to type it.

26 Feb 2026UK Environment Agency Thermal Transport of Air Pollution from Regulated Industries (TAPRI) project reports published

The UK Environment Agency have published a suite of reports resulting from their research project to assess the impacts of thermal air flows on atmospheric pollutant dispersion.

The TAPRI project explored how certain local weather patterns - thermal flows such as sea breezes, warm city air, or cold air from hillsides - can affect how air pollution disperses from industrial and waste sites. Real-world examples, data analysis, and computer modelling were used to explore how often these weather patterns occur, how much they impact air quality, and how they might change in the future.

There are six reports, comprising summary reports, stakeholder consultation and an exploration of the project outcomes.

The CERC report is titled Case studies on thermal flow conditions. CERC's analyses of meteorological, land use and topographical data for selected 'pilot areas' are presented, leading to a better understanding of thermal flows. We explored approaches that could be used to model air quality impacts of thermal flows, using the models ADMS and KLAM-21 and using Numerical Weather Prediction (NWP) data.

The work was carried out by CERC in collaboration with Air Quality Consultants (AQC) and John Moncrieff (University of Edinburgh School of Geosciences), as part of Defra's Research Development & Evidence Framework Agreement.

The image shows 'The Barber' katabatic wind that blows down the Grey Valley in Greymouth, New Zealand.

9 Feb 2026Assessing health and financial impacts of county-wide air quality policy

As part of their Air Quality Strategy, Oxfordshire County Council have released their report describing the generation of data for assessing the health impacts and associated financial costs of air pollution. The impacts were calculated using a combination of CERC's ADMS-Urban model and University of Birmingham's Air Quality Lifecourse Assessment Tool (AQ-LAT). The AQ-LAT calculates the impact of PM_2.5 and NO₂ pollution on health outcomes, mortality and associated healthcare costs.

To create input for AQ-LAT, CERC modelled air pollution concentrations associated with the introduction of a range of positive interventions. These interventions included both national policies, such as achieving Net-Zero, and local policies, such as introducing all electric bus routes in selected towns.

The effectiveness of each policy was assessed by comparing modelled results from each policy scenario with the baseline. We generated highly detailed pollution maps across Oxfordshire using ADMS-Urban and then processed outputs to generate the air pollution data required as input to AQ-LAT. The first figure shows a detailed pollution map, focused on Oxford.

Our combined results clearly demonstrate the effectiveness of certain policies; the second figure shows how Oxfordshire ranked the health savings of single-sector interventions using AQ-LAT. Reduction in industrial emissions, tighter regulation on domestic wood burning, and displacing road freight are the most impactful single sector interventions.

Multi-sector interventions, such as the National Net-Zero Pathway, result in the biggest gains for human health. Please see CERC and Oxfordshire County Council's ADMS-Urban and ADMS-Roads User Group meeting presentation for more details.

ADMS-Urban and AQ-LAT are extremely compatible, and together represent a product that is detailed, scalable, and informative. Please get in touch if you would like to know more.

19 Dec 2025MAQS Coupled System 1.4 released

MAQS is CERC's innovative automated system for coupling the high-resolution air quality model ADMS-Urban to a regional air quality model. The output comprises predictions of pollutant concentrations for an urban area, which take into account both regional and local pollutant transport and chemistry effects.

The utilities and scripts in the new version have been updated to include the following features:

• Compatibility with the recently released ADMS-Urban and ADMS-Airport version 5.1
• Automatic update of existing input configuration (.cfg) files from previous versions of MAQS into the new version
• Allows the use of a site properties data file with ADMS-Urban to allow spatially varying site parameters for each grid cell
• Extraction of surface roughness length at the met. site from regional meteorological data files for use by ADMS-Urban

For full details on the changes within MAQS 1.4 please see the What's New document.