Air pollutants forecasting

As TAPM was being developed, the opportunity arose to integrate its chemical transport component with Australian Bureau of Meteorology s weather forecasting system to provide real-time weather and air pollution forecasts. TAPM already had been using historical 6-hourly BoM global analyses to initialise that model so, the... 

Baklanov, A., Rasmussen, A., Fay, B., Berge, E., and Finardi, S. (2002) Potential and shortcomings of numerical weather prediction models in providing meteorological data for urban air pollution forecasting. Water, Air and Soil Poll. Focus 2, 43-60. 

The serious pollution episodes in the urban environment are not generally earned by the sudden increase in the emission of pollutants, but are rather a result of short-term unfavourable meteorological conditions. A cost-effective way to prevent the occurrence of high air pollution episodes might be the temporal reduction in emissions that is based on the meteorological and air pollution forecast. 

The Bucharest station (part of the Global Atmospheric Watch (GAW) Ozone Network as "associated station") fulfils the interaction with other programs and activities. Romania is a permanent participant in the WMO/GAW - GOOS and some European Union Programmes concerning the monitoring of the ozone layer. The research orientation of lAMAS is also related to a development (in the NIMH) of an operational Air Pollution Forecast System. Its goal is to produce 3-day air pollution forecasts of the most important air pollution species on different... 

Gene DD, Yesilyurt C, Tuned G (2009) Air pollution forecasting in Ankara, Turkey using air pollution index and its relation to assimilative capacity of the atmosphere. Environ Monit Assess 166(1 ) 11-27... 

Dynamic meteorological models, much like air pollution models, strive to describe the physics and thermodynamics of atmospheric motions as accurately as is feasible. Besides being used in conjunction with air quaHty models, they ate also used for weather forecasting. Like air quaHty models, dynamic meteorological models solve a set of partial differential equations (also called primitive equations). This set of equations, which ate fundamental to the fluid mechanics of the atmosphere, ate referred to as the Navier-Stokes equations, and describe the conservation of mass and momentum. They ate combined with equations describing energy conservation and thermodynamics in a moving fluid (72) ... 

Fig. 21-4. Number of forecast days of high air pollution potential per 5 years (1960-1964), Source Adapted from Holzworth (2).

McCollister, G. M., and K. R. Wilson. Linear stochastic models for forecasting daily maxima and hourly concentrations of air pollutants. Atmos. Environ. 9 417-423,1975. 

This paper provides an overview of the techniques used by policy analysts to estimate air pollution emission from anthropogenic sources. The development of an inventory of emissions from a large nunber of emission sources by direct measurement would be prohibitively expensive. Therefore, estimation techniques are used which, although somewhat less reliable at the specific unit or boiler level, provide a reasonable assessment of emissions on average. Although no physical measurement is used, policy analysts are able to generate historic and current estimates, and future forecasts, of air pollutant emissions. This paper provides an overview of the techniques used to provide such estimates and forecasts. 

The purpose of this paper is to provide chemists with an overview of the techniques used by policy analysts to estimate future air pollutant emissions. A comparison of modeling techniques for future periods is also made with techniques for historical and current periods. In addition, sample estimates of forecasted sulfur... 

The impacts and risks of the three approaches above and the actions they imply depend on what the future holds for the energy supply, energy prices and their impact on the economy, and environmental concerns such as climate change and regional air pollution. Because it is impossible to forecast the future with any reasonable accuracy, we suggested, for discussion purposes, four different futures that California might find itself in 15 years from now. Each of the three policy approaches would have different risks and impacts depending on what the future holds. The four future scenarios are as follows ... 

The regional air quality (AQ) forecasting system of FMI has been set up in 2005 and opened for public access via internet in 2006 (http //silam.fmi.fi). A primary goal of the system is to evaluate and forecast the air pollution over the Finnish territory. Since Finland is a receptor of practically all main pollutants, the area of the simulations is necessarily covered the whole of Europe with a compromising resolution of 30 km. A nested domain was introduced in 2007 and it covers northern Europe with a resolution of 10 km. 

The model system is developed to simulate aerosols and gas-phase compounds from regional to urban scale of ground-level gas-phase air pollutants. It has been used for air quality forecasts of ground-level gas-phase air pollutants and modelling of historical data. 

The Atmospheric Chemistry Transport modelling system used is based on the off-line coupled CAMx and HIRLAM models has been developed to simulate particulate and gas-phase air pollution on different scales. It has been used to simulate short and longterm releases of different chemical species and air pollution episodes. At present it is run in a pre-operational mode 4 times per day based on 3D meteorological fields produced by the HIRLAM NWP model. Currently this modelling system is setup to perform chemical weather forecasts for a series of chemical species (such as O3, NO, NO2, CO and SO2) and forecasted 2D fields at surface are available for each model as well as an ensemble of models (based on 12 European regional air quality models). The simulated output is publicly available and it is placed at the ECMWF website (http //gems.ecmwf.int/d/products/raq/forecasts/) of the EC FP6 GEMS project. 

Examples of the surface ozone and nitrogen dioxide forecasts vs. observations are shown in Fig. 16.8. The produced plots are forecasts (top panel) of O3 and NO2 at 00 UTC on 19 Mar 2010 together with near-real-time observations (bottom panel) of these species. The simulations resulted in a relatively medium air pollution levels over the Central and Eastern Europe with a few hot-spots. For O3 it is an episode observed in the east of the Northern Italy, Austria and Slovenia and... 

There are several shortcomings of the current HIRLAM and other NWP models for use in air pollution modelling and Chemical Weather Forecasting (CWF), including the following ... 

Figure 9.2 Outline of the overall FUMAPEX methodology integrating models from urban meteorology to air quality and population exposure. The main improvements of meteorological forecasts (NWP) in urban areas, interfaces and integration with urban air pollution (UAP) and population exposure (PE) models for the Urban Air Quality Information Forecasting and Information Systems (UAQIFS) are mentioned on the scheme (Baklanov et al., 2005 [36]).

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