Caliope: an operational air quality forecasting system for the Iberian Peninsula, Balearic Islands and Canary Islands – first annual evaluation and ongoing developments

Abstract

10 pages, 4 figures, 2 tables.-- Contributed to: 7th EMS Annual Meeting and 8th European Conference on Applications of Meteorology 2007 (San Lorenzo de El Escorial, Spain, Oct 1-5, 2007). ; The Caliope project funded by the Spanish Ministry of the Environment establishes an air quality forecasting system for Spain to increase the knowledge on transport and dynamics of pollutants in Spain, to assure the accomplishment of legislation and to inform the population about the levels of pollutants, topics in which the European Commission has shown a great concern. The present contribution describes the first quantitative verification study performed so far with two chemistry transport models (CMAQ and CHIMERE) for a reference year (2004) at medium spatial resolution (around 20×20 km for the Iberian Peninsula). Both models perform similarly in the case of ground-level ozone. The mean normalised gross error MNGE remains below 15–20% during summertime, when ozone episodes occur, outlining the good skills of the system concerning the forecasting of air quality in Spain. Furthermore, the ongoing developments of the system towards high resolution modelling (4×4 km for Spain, 12×12 km for Europe, 1 h temporal resolution) and the integration with observations within the Caliope umbrella are described. ; This work is funded by the Caliope project of the Spanish Ministry of the Environment (441/2006/3-12.1 and A357/200/2-12.1). CMAQ and DREAM simulations were performed in the MareNostrum supercomputer hosted by the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC). ; Peer reviewed