An Air Quality Forecasting tool over southern Italy
The WRF-CHIMERE-AODEM regional modelling system is implemented over southern Italy in the framework of I-AMICA PON Project.

WRF (Wheather Research and Forecast system, Shamarock et al., (2008)) meteorological model is run on three nested domains covering Europe, Italy, and southern Italy at respectively 54, 18, and 6 km horizontal resolution. The chemistry transport model CHIMERE (Bessagnet et al., 2008) is used to simulate gas and aerosol composition on the three domains at 0.54°, 0.18°, and 0.06° horizontal resolution.

Anthropogenic hourly emissions of primary pollutants over Italy are derived from the CTN-ACE inventory developed by national environmental agencies. Biogenic volatile organic compound emissions are calculated with MEGAN model driven by WRF radiation and temperature fields.
AODEM (Aerosol Optical DEpth Module, T.C. Landi 2013) is a postprocessing tool conceived for chemistry-transport models. AODEM computes particle number concentrations and extinction coefficients, and Aerosol Optical Depth (AOD) for each grid-cell, species, size bin and time, under the assumption of spherical particles.

Description of variables shown:
T2 : WRF prediction of air temperature at 2 meter above the surface.
PM10 : CHIMERE prediction of Particulate Matter concentration – with aerodynamic diameter smaller then 10 ¹m – at ground level (please see http://www.epa.gov/airtrends/aqtrnd95/pm10.html)
AOD : AODEM prediction of Aerosol Optical Depth (please see http://daac.gsfc.nasa.gov/data-holdings/PIP/aerosol_optical_thickness_or_depth.shtml)