Abstract
Modelling has become a very useful tool in air quality management. The accurate prediction of air quality using numerical models involves correctly simulating both the meteorology and chemical processes. Resolution plays an essential role in the quality of model predictions. Choosing an appropriate resolution is important to obtain good air quality forecasts. In this paper the influence of four different model resolutions on model predictions has been analyzed over the Madrid area for a summer period in 2004. The comparison between model results and observations using traditional evaluation statistics for some pollutants indicate that a significant improvement is found when comparing the coarsest domains, but it is much lower or inexistent for the finest domains. A spectral analysis of a topographic profile crossing the area and the evaluation of predicted meteorological parameters, such as wind speed and temperature, suggests that transitioning from 36-to 19-km grid spacing allows the definition of the major mesoscale topographic features and therefore, the atmospheric circulations. A better behaviour of pollutant predictions should be related to an improvement of meteorological predictions in terms of the parameterizations involved in the meteorological model and the input data, such as land use information. Also the use of more accurate emissions is needed to improve the traditional objective verification scores.
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Vivanco, M.G., Azula, O., Palomino, I., Martín, F. (2011). Evaluating the Impact of Resolution on the Predictions of an Air Quality Model over Madrid Area (Spain). In: Murgante, B., Borruso, G., Lapucci, A. (eds) Geocomputation, Sustainability and Environmental Planning. Studies in Computational Intelligence, vol 348. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-19733-8_9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-19733-8_9
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