Abstract
Air pollution is responsible for many adverse effects on human beings. Thermal discomfort, on the other hand, is able to overload the human body and eventually provoke health implications due to the heat imbalance. Methods: The aim of the presented work is to study the behavior of two bio-climatic indices and statistical characteristics of the air quality index for Sofia city—the capital of Bulgaria for the period 2008–2014. The study is based on the WRF-CMAQ model system simulations with a spatial resolution of 1 km. The air quality is estimated by the air quality index, taking into account the influence of different pollutants and the thermal conditions by two indices, respectively, for hot and cold weather. It was found that the recurrence of both the heat and cold index categories and of the air quality categories have heterogeneous space distribution and well manifested diurnal and seasonal variability. For all of the situations, only O3 and PM10 are the dominant pollutants—these which determine the AQI category. It was found that AQI1, AQI2, and AQI3, which fall in the “Low” band, have the highest recurrence during the different seasons, up to more than 70% in some places and situations. The recurrence of AQI10 (very high) is rather small—no more than 5% and concentrated in small areas, mostly in the city center. The Heat index of category “Danger” never appears, and the Heat index of category “Extreme caution” appears only in the spring and summer with the highest recurrence of less than 5% in the city center. For the Wind-chill index category, “Very High Risk” never appears, and the category “High Risk” appears with a frequency of about 1–2%. The above leads to the conclusion that both from a point of view of bioclimatic and air quality indices, the human health risks in the city of Sofia are not as high.
Highlights
The air is the living environment of human beings, and obviously, a number of atmospheric parameters, have great importance for the quality of life and human health
According to the WHO, air pollution severely affects the health of European citizens [1]
TNO inventory [59] is exploited for the territories outside Bulgaria in the mother CMAQs domain
Summary
The air is the living environment of human beings, and obviously, a number of atmospheric parameters, have great importance for the quality of life and human health. Some of the most important groups of characteristics of the atmosphere directly affect quality of life and human health. According to the WHO, air pollution severely affects the health of European citizens [1] (between 2.5 and 11% of the total number of annual deaths are due to air pollution [2]). Current legislation (e.g., ozone daughter directive 2002/3/EC and the recent directive 2008/50/EC for AQ and clean air for Europe [3,4]) requires informing the public on AQ, assessing air pollutant concentrations throughout the whole territory of Member States and indicating an exceedance of limit and target values, forecasting potential exceedance, and assessing possible emergency measures to abate exceedance using modelling tools
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