Forecasting urban air quality over cities by statistical adaptation of deterministic Chemistry Transport Model outputs

Abstract : In case of high pollution events, the activation of public information and emergen-cy procedures can be based not only on the air quality situation reported by moni-toring observations but also on the analysis of air quality forecasts. Operational use of large scale deterministic models has become widespread for those last years. In France, the national air quality monitoring and forecasting PREV'AIR system (http://www.prevair.org) has been operated since 2003. Based on numeri-cal tools it provides daily forecasts and maps of the main regulated pollutants (ozone, NO2, PM10) at the European and national scales. On the other hand, statis-tical models are widely used to locally predict concentrations from past measure-ments and meteorological forecasts.