With this article we introduce the NEANIAS A3 Service, Atmo forecast. Air pollution is currently the most important environmental risk to human health (as reported by the European Environment Agency), especially in urban areas, where most of the population lives, according to the UN.
The dream is to abate air pollution; however, it is unrealistic to speak about no air pollution given the impossibility of eliminating all anthropogenic sources and the difficulty of controlling natural source emissions. Thus, the air quality programs, plans and strategies aim to reduce atmospheric pollutants to a point that well-being is assured. The reduction of air pollution in largely populated areas remains a challenge because it requires a substantial economic investment and changes in human behaviours and energy use. But, how do we aim to reduce air pollution in cities if we lack the knowledge of the spatial distribution of air pollutants through an urban area? The local air quality monitoring stations may give information on pollutants concentration in the specific monitored area. However, they are not sufficient to give the overall information on urban air quality. Therefore, it is crucial to develop and implement air quality modelling systems that may report urban air quality information.
Therefore, the ATMO-4CAST service aims to help in answering this one crucial question by proposing a modelling system able to forecast and estimate urban air quality. This service will deliver a novel cloud-based solution providing crucial information and products to a variety of stakeholders in agriculture, urban/ city authorities, health, insurance agencies and relative governmental authorities. The air quality modelling system, currently under development, must consider the transport of pollutants from long distances and local scale effects, which are intrinsically dependent on the local weather.
In this sense, the ATMO-4CAST provides the possibility to make weather predictions by means of the Advanced Research Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF-ARW) modelling system. The WRF-ARW is suitable for use in a broad range of applications from urban to regional scale studies. This model has two classes of simulations: ideal or real initialisation. Given the purpose of ATMO-4CAST, the service developed only simulates the last class. In a way of simplifying the compilation of data, the service developed requires only the WRF Pre-processing System (WPS) input data and the definition of both namelist inputs (configuration files), as explained below. In the ATMO-4CAST service there are two ways of compiling the input data.
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