Abstract. CHIMERE is a chemistry-transport model designed for regional atmospheric composition. It can be used at a variety of scales from local to continental domains. However, due to the model design and its historical use as a regional model, major limitations had remained, hampering its use at hemispheric scale, due to the coordinate system used for transport as well as to missing processes that are important in regions outside Europe. Most of these limitations have been removed in the CHIMERE-2017 version, allowing its use in any region of the world and at any scale, from the scale of a single urban area up to hemispheric scale, with or without polar regions included. Other important improvements have been made in the treatment of the physical processes affecting aerosols and the emissions of mineral dust. From a computational point of view, the parallelization strategy of the model has also been updated in order to improve model numerical performance and reduce the code complexity. The present article describes all these changes. Statistical scores for a model simulation over continental Europe are presented, and a simulation of the circumpolar transport of volcanic ash plume from the Puyehue volcanic eruption in June 2011 in Chile provides a test case for the new model version at hemispheric scale.

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Changes in temperature due to variability in meteorology and climate change are expected to significantly impact atmospheric composition. The Mediterranean is a climate sensitive region and includes megacities like Istanbul and large urban agglomerations such as Athens. The effect of temperature changes on gaseous air pollutant levels and the atmospheric processes that are controlling them in the Eastern Mediterranean are here investigated. The WRF/CMAQ mesoscale modeling system is used, coupled with the MEGAN model for the processing of biogenic volatile organic compound emissions. A set of temperature perturbations (spanning from 1 to 5 K) is applied on a base case simulation corresponding to July 2004. The results indicate that the Eastern Mediterranean basin acts as a reservoir of pollutants and their precursor emissions from large urban agglomerations. During summer, chemistry is a major sink at these urban areas near the surface, and a minor contributor at downwind areas. On average, the atmospheric processes are more effective within the first 1000 m above ground. Temperature increases lead to increases in biogenic emissions by 9±3% K⁻¹. Ozone mixing ratios increase almost linearly with the increases in ambient temperatures by 1±0.1 ppb O₃ K⁻¹ for all studied urban and receptor stations except for Istanbul, where a 0.4±0.1 ppb O₃ K⁻¹ increase is calculated, which is about half of the domain-averaged increase of 0.9±0.1 ppb O₃ K⁻¹. The computed changes in atmospheric processes are also linearly related with temperature changes

Abstract. Ozone and PM 2.5 concentrations over the city of Paris are modeled with the CHIMERE air-quality model at 4 km × 4 km horizontal resolution for two future emission scenarios. A high-resolution (1 km × 1 km) emission projection until 2020 for the greater Paris region is developed by local experts (AIRPARIF) and is further extended to year 2050 based on regional-scale emission projections developed by the Global Energy Assessment. Model evaluation is performed based on a 10-year control simulation. Ozone is in very good agreement with measurements while PM 2.5 is underestimated by 20 % over the urban area mainly due to a large wet bias in wintertime precipitation. A significant increase of maximum ozone relative to present-day levels over Paris is modeled under the "business-as-usual" scenario (+7 ppb) while a more optimistic "mitigation" scenario leads to a moderate ozone decrease (−3.5 ppb) in year 2050. These results are substantially different to previous regionalscale projections where 2050 ozone is found to decrease under both future scenarios. A sensitivity analysis showed that this difference is due to the fact that ozone formation over Paris at the current urban-scale study is driven by volatile organic compound (VOC)-limited chemistry, whereas at the regional-scale ozone formation occurs under NO x -sensitive conditions. This explains why the sharp NO x reductions implemented in the future scenarios have a different effect on ozone projections at different scales. In rural areas, projections at both scales yield similar results showing that the longer timescale processes of emission transport and ozone formation are less sensitive to model resolution. PM 2.5 concentrations decrease by 78 % and 89 % under business-asusual and mitigation scenarios, respectively, compared to the present-day period. The reduction is much more prominent over the urban part of the domain due to the effective reductions of road transport and residential emissions resulting in the smoothing of the large urban increment modeled in the control simulation.

Multi-scale HIAs can illustrate the difference in direct consequences of costly mitigation policies and provide results that may help decision-makers choose between different policy alternatives at different scales.

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Abstract. While previous research helped to identify and prioritize the sources of error in air-quality modeling due to anthropogenic emissions and spatial scale effects, our knowledge is limited on how these uncertainties affect climateforced air-quality assessments. Using as reference a 10-year model simulation over the greater Paris (France) area at 4 km resolution and anthropogenic emissions from a 1 km resolution bottom-up inventory, through several tests we estimate the sensitivity of modeled ozone and PM 2.5 concentrations to different potentially influential factors with a particular interest over the urban areas. These factors include the model horizontal and vertical resolution, the meteorological input from a climate model and its resolution, the use of a top-down emission inventory, the resolution of the emissions input and the post-processing coefficients used to derive the temporal, vertical and chemical split of emissions. We show that urban ozone displays moderate sensitivity to the resolution of emissions (∼ 8 %), the post-processing method (6.5 %) and the horizontal resolution of the air-quality model (∼ 5 %), while annual PM 2.5 levels are particularly sensitive to changes in their primary emissions (∼ 32 %) and the resolution of the emission inventory (∼ 24 %). The air-quality model horizontal and vertical resolution have little effect on model predictions for the specific study domain. In the case of modeled ozone concentrations, the implementation of refined input data results in a consistent decrease (from 2.5 up to 8.3 %), mainly due to inhibition of the titration rate by nitrogen oxides. Such consistency is not observed for PM 2.5 . In contrast this consistency is not observed for PM 2.5 . In addition we use the results of these sensitivities to explain and quantify the discrepancy between a coarse (∼ 50 km) and a fine (4 km) resolution simulation over the urban area. We show that the ozone bias of the coarse run (+9 ppb) is reduced by ∼ 40 % by adopting a higher resolution emission inventory, by 25 % by using a post-processing technique based on the local inventory (same improvement is obtained by increasing model horizontal resolution) and by 10 % by adopting the annual emission totals of the local inventory. The bias of PM 2.5 concentrations follows a more complex pattern, with the positive values associated with the coarse run (+3.6 µg m −3 ), increasing or decreasing depending on the type of the refinement. We conclude that in the case of fine particles, the coarse simulation cannot selectively incorporate local-scale features in order to reduce its error.

This paper describes a computational system developed for the compilation of an anthropogenic emission inventory of gaseous pollutants for Greece. The inventory was developed using a geographical information system integrated with SQL programming language to provide high temporal gridded emission fields for CO, NO 2 , NO, SO 2 , NH 3 and 23 nonmethane volatile organic compounds (NMVOCs) species for the reference year 2003. Activity and statistical data from national sources were used for the quantification of emissions from the road transport, the other mobile sources and machinery sectors and from range activities using top-down or bottom-up methodologies. Annual emission data from existing national and European emission databases were also used. The emission data were spatially and temporally disaggregated using source-specific spatiotemporal indicators. On national scale, the road transport sector produces about 60% of the annual CO and NMVOC total emissions, with gasoline vehicles being the main CO and NMVOC emissions source. The road transport is responsible for approximately half of the higher alkanes and for more than half of the ethene and toluene emissions. The maritime sector accounts for about 40% of the annual total NO x emissions, most of which are emitted by the international shipping subsector, whilst SO 2 is emitted mainly by the energy sector. The evaluation of the emissions inventory suggests that it provides a good representation of the amounts of gaseous pollutants emitted on national scale and a good characterisation of the relative composition of CO and NO x emission in the large urban centres.