Air pollution is one of the major problems of mankind, transport of pollutants extending far beyond the borders of the countries where they were produced, causing unpredictable, direct and indirect changes of the environment. The main tool for the study of this phenomenon consists of mathematical modeling of complex physical and chemical phenomena involved. In practice, air emissions are estimated on basis of measurements taken from selected sources being representative of the major categories and types. At national level, the Air Quality Evaluation Center (CECA) provides regular reports to the European Environment Agency (EEA) or the European Commission as requirements of Romania’s lawful duties in air quality domain. The registry of emissions TNO/ MACC (Netherlands Organisation for Applied Scientific Research/ Monitoring Atmospheric Composition and Climate) contains emissions inventories which have been homogenized and checked in advance and obtained from emissions officially reported at sectoral level for each country. In this study, for the analysis of the weather numerical dispersion and transport of pollutants, it has been used the numerical air quality model WRF-CHEM version 3.5, centered over Romania, at the spatial resolution of 10 km, using as input data the TNO emission database for 2009. By interpolating values from the regular grid of the TNO database with the WRF-CHEM model 3.5 grid, monthly average values were obtained for each day of the week, for any parameter considered. Preliminary results obtained for different pollutants (for example: PM10, O3) confirm the need to validate these results by implementing and integrating air quality forecasting model by assimilating different types of measurements (data model, gravimetric data observations, etc.).
Pollutants in large amounts may not only cause severe health problems and damage crops, but may also represent one of the main causes of global warming. Air quality numerical models are very useful tools in forecasting air pollutants transport and spread. Consequently, this paper analyzes the regional concentration of PM10 (a geographical domain representative of Romania’s territory), by using the numerical air quality forecasting model: WRF-CHEM version 3.5. The respective model has been applied on a Romania-centered upon geographical area, for both the two months representative of the warm and cold seasons (June and January 2013, respectively), at a spatial resolution of 10 km, with a 24 hours’ anticipation. For the WRF-CHEM chemistry module to be initiated, values of PM10 emissions were extracted from the TNO (Nederlandse Organisatie voor toegepast natuurwetenschappelijk onderzoek, www.tno.nl) database for 2009. The meteorological parameters required by the weather forecast model were obtained from the numerical output of the ECMWF (www.ecmwf.int) global model. All these meteorological parameters are very important for air quality simulations, especially wind profiles, which are very important assessment tools since they determine where pollutants are transported, and air-temperature as it may largely influence the speed of chemical reactions in the atmosphere. The vertical diffusion is strongly linked to the height of the mixing layer and influences the exchange between the ground layers and the open troposphere. In order to highlight the quality of the numerical forecasts for PM10 from the WRF-CHEM model, the results obtained were compared to the measurements obtained through gravimetric methods (average daily values of PM10). Hence, specific measurements were provided by the National Environmental Protection Agency (ANPM).
<p>A new urban canopy scheme for the ICON atmospheric model is presented. Increasing the resolution of atmospheric models for numerical weather prediction (NWP) or climate simulations allows, among others, for a more realistic description of the processes at the land surface. Here, one field of growing interest are the processes in urban areas. Beside their relevance for the meteorological modelling, there is a general trend in most countries that the number of people living in towns is significantly increasing. During the recent years, an urban canopy parameterization was developed for the multi-layer land surface scheme TERRA of the Consortium for Small-scale Modeling (COSMO) mesoscale atmospheric model. This parameterisation, TERRA_URB, originally developed for the climate version of COSMO and then ported to the NWP version, was shown to be able to reproduce the key urban meteorological features for different European cities. In the framework of the transition of the COSMO Consortium to the ICON model, TERRA_URB needs to be implemented in ICON. Furthermore, an updated set of urban canopy parameters needs to be provided, for describing the urban characteristics down to a mesh size of 1 km, and below. For these purposes, the COSMO Consortium organises the dedicated Priority Project CITTA&#8217;. First results are presented for TERRA_URB in the ICON limited-area model ICON-LAM for different cities of interest of the CITTA&#8217; partners. The preliminary results indicate already that urban features like the urban heat island effect are well represented. This is in agreement with the experiences with TERRA_URB in the COSMO model, both the climate as well as the NWP version.</p>
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