QualeAria

Forecast system for the Air Quality in Italy and Europe.

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Results

Since 2007, QualeAria forecasts concentrations of all pollutants covered by EU legislation (among the others: SO2, NO2, CO, PM10, O3 and benzene) over Europe and Italy. The air quality forecast is presently provided for the current day and up to 120 hours.

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System Overview

QualeAria main purpose is to forecast regional scale air pollution over the Italian peninsula. This is performed implementing three-dimensional state-of-the-art models to describe emission, dispersion and transformation of pollutants in the atmosphere.

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Input Details

Dynamic initial and boundary conditions are assigned from meteorological and dispersion global models. The emission input for anthropogenic sources is prepared from reference inventories, while for natural sources is estimated online.

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Forecast.

Browse through the maps of the hourly mean, daily maximum and daily mean. Click the target area and the parameter to visualize. Last update

Italy » Europe »

hourly mean

daily maximum

daily mean

Licenza Creative Commons

System Description. QualeAria modelling moduls.

QualeAria is based on FARM (Flexible Air quality Regional Model) ), a 3D Eulerian model simulating dispersion and chemical reactions of atmospheric pollutants, and is managed by F-Air (Arianet Integrated Forecast System Manager), a software environment where the data sources and the modelling components are connected:

  • RAMS prognostic meteorological model, providing the downscaling of synoptic weather forecast on the computational domains of interest;
  • a meteorological interface module GAP+SURFPro matching the standard output fields produced by the meteorological driver with the needs of FARM (grid adaptations, diffusion parameters, deposition velocities, etc.);
  • EMMA (Emission Manager), preparing gridded hourly emissions of all the pollutants considered by FARM starting from national and continental inventories;
  • pre-processors preparing the hourly boundary conditions (BC) for pollutants on FARM background domain, starting from large-scale air quality forecast;
  • finally, post-processing modules computing air quality indicators, checking possible air quality standards exceedances and producing plots and tailored data (e.g. BC for regional air quality forecasting systems), allowing to disseminate the results to stakeholders and the general public.

    • Read more here.

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    Input overview. BC/IC and emissions.

    The meteorological downscaling is produced starting from GFS synoptic scale weather forecasts distributed by the US weather Service (NCEP).
    Air quality boundary conditions are prepared from the global scale forecast provided daily by the ECMWF MACC-C-IFS-TM5 model as part of the Copernicus Atmosphere monitoring service.
    Anthropogenic emissions are assigned starting from the reference national emission inventory distributed by ISPRA for Italy and the TNO/MEGAPOLI inventory for Europe. Emissions from natural sources (biogenic emissions, soil dust and sea salt) are dynamically assigned through SURFPro.
    Read more here.

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