Abstract
The European Earth observation programme Copernicus, formerly known as GMES (Global Monitoring for Environment and Security) is establishing a core global and regional environmental atmospheric service as a component of the Europe’s Copernicus/GMES initiative through successive R&D projects led by ECMWF (European Center for Medium-range Weather Forecasting) and funded by the 6th and 7th European Framework Programme for Research and Horizon 2020 Programme: GEMS, MACC, MACC-II and MACC-III. AEMET (Spanish State Meteorological Agency) has participated in the projects MACC and MACC-II and continues participating in MACC-III (http://atmosphere.copernicus.eu). AEMET has contributed to those projects by generating high-resolution (0.05 degrees) daily air-quality forecasts for the Western Mediterranean up to 48 hours aiming to analyse the dependence of the quality of forecasts on resolution. We monitor the evolution of different chemical species such as NO2, O3, CO y SO2 at surface and different vertical levels using the global model MOCAGE and the MACC Regional Ensemble forecasts as chemical boundary conditions. We will show different case-studies, where the considered chemical species present high values and will show a validation of the air-quality by comparing to some of the available air-quality observations (EMEP/GAW, regional -autonomous communities- and local -city councils- air-quality monitoring networks) over the forecast domain. The aim of our participation in these projects is helping to improve the understanding of the processes involved in the air-quality forecast in the Mediterranean where special factors such as highly populated areas together with an intense solar radiation make air-quality forecast-ing particularly challenging.
Highlights
The air-quality forecasting is a complex task involving physical and chemical processes at very different time and space scales occurring simultaneously and depending on natural and anthropogenic emissions and meteorological conditions
Our work within the MACC, MACC-II and MACC-III ensemble subprojects consists of running a high resolution chemical transport model (CTM) using MACC regional ensemble forecasts (ENS) as chemical lateral boundary conditions for some species (O3, SO2, carbon monoxide (CO) and NO2) at four levels (SFC, 500m, 1000m and 3000m) which are interpolated to the MOCAGE model levels up to 5000 m, and investigating if high resolution forecasting can add value to air quality forecasts
Among the conclusions of our contribution to the different MACC projects it can be mentioned that, provided that they use the same geographical domain, meteorological forcings (ECMWF-IFS), high-resolution emission inventory (TNO-MACC) and chemical lateral boundary conditions (MOZART-IFS), the variability of the different individual models remains very high in the cases we have studied
Summary
The air-quality forecasting is a complex task involving physical and chemical processes at very different time and space scales occurring simultaneously and depending on natural and anthropogenic emissions and meteorological conditions. The scheme to provide lateral boundary conditions to our MACC configuration of MOCAGE has in consequence three stages: Horizontal Interpolation Hourly ENS forecasts are downloaded daily for the species NO, NO2, O3 and SO2 at 4 vertical levels (at surface, z=500 m, z=1000 m and z=3000 m) up to H+48. The case studies are selected searching situations with high pollution levels in which high resolution could have been an advantage They are analyzed comparing the forecasts from ENS and MOCAGE-AEM to observations from EMEP and different local and regional Air Quality Monitoring networks.
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