Abstract
Since 2003, the national PREV’AIR system (www.prevair.org) has been delivering daily air quality forecasts of atmospheric pollutants (O3, NO2, PM10, PM2.5) over Europe and France. Those products are based on chemistry-transport modeling and in particular on the outputs from CHIMERE model. Analysed air quality maps of the previous day are also produced by mixing observed and simulated data through a geostatistical approach.
More recently a methodology has been developed to improve the accuracy of CHIMERE forecasts. It consists of two main stages.
In a preliminary stage, statistical short-term forecasting models are built and validated for each French and European rural or (sub)urban background monitoring site. The response variables are the O3 daily maximum, NO2 daily maximum and PM10 daily average concentrations of the current and the next 2 days. This part is based on the developments carried out and tested within CITEAIRII project (www.citeair.eu).
In the operational stage, the statistical models identified as reliable enough are applied with a daily frequency to predict concentrations at the corresponding monitoring sites. Locally forecast concentrations are then combined with CHIMERE forecast concentration fields according to the same geostatistical approach as aforementioned. This has been tested so far for O3 and PM10. Validation against independent data shows a significant improvement of the forecasts compared with raw CHIMERE outputs.
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Questioner Name: Ujjwal Kumar
Q: CHIMERE air quality concentrations have been used just as exogeneous variables in the statistical model to make air quality forecasts and then kriging has been applied to extend it for full domain. What if we remove “CHIMERE values” from the statistical model and then try to make forecasts with mapping? I guess, it can still give reasonable results. Has such comparison been made?
A: CHIMERE results are actually used:
– at the monitoring stations, as possible predictor in the statistical models;
– over the whole domain, as drift in the kriging.
In the statistical modelling, a set of predictors is automatically selected from a list of potential explanatory variables. It may occur that after selection CHIMERE is removed from that set. However this is usually not the case; comparison tests indicated that in general, CHIMERE significantly increased the explanatory power of the statistical models.
In the kriging, CHIMERE proved very useful as well, enabling a better estimation of the concentration spatial variability and the production of more realistic air pollution maps.
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Malherbe, L., Ung, A., Meleux, F., Bessagnet, B. (2014). A Statistical Approach to Improve Air Quality Forecasts in the PREV’AIR System. In: Steyn, D., Builtjes, P., Timmermans, R. (eds) Air Pollution Modeling and its Application XXII. NATO Science for Peace and Security Series C: Environmental Security. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-5577-2_35
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-5577-2_35
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