The ELISE Atmospheric Modelling System
An innovative AMS to monitor air quality in urban areas
ELISE AMS is a complex set of models, pre and post processing codes, providing hourly updated and high-resolution forecasts of air pollution in urban areas.
The system is running since April 2015 on the city of Torino, Italy computing hourly NO2 concentration fields at street level.
Microscale
Microscale simulations with horizontal resolution of 6 m are run on a 3D grid taking into account city buildings: about 52000 obstacles with a maximum height of 167 m.
Large urban area
The modelling system currently runs on an extended portion (6 x 7.2 km2) of the city of Torino, Italy.
Emissions
Bottom-up NOx traffic emissions on the main roads are complemented with diffuse emissions assigned to secondary streets, for a total of about 13000 linear sources.
Meteorology
Meteorological fields are obtained by PSWIFT, a parallelized 3D wind field model for complex terrain which produces a mass-consistent wind field using data from the large scale forecast system QualeAria.
Dispersion
Pollutants dispersion is modelled through a lagrangian 3D model (Parallel Micro Spray) allowing for multi-tiles decomposition of large domain on multi-core machines (Aria Technologies - Arianet).
Background
Other emissions and pollution coming from outside the domain are integrated by means of background NO, NO2 and O3 fields from the QualeAria forecast system.
Validation
Comparison with different institutional monitoring sites (background and traffic) shows how well ELISE is capable to reproduce spatial inhomogeneities in NO2 levels typical of the urban environment.
CPU efficiency
The ELISE AMS is running on a regular workstation with just 16 Intel™ Xeon™ computational cores. It is also able to run on low cost and energy efficient ARM clusters.
Adaptability
Modelling of other pollutants, such as PM, benzene, etc. can be easily implemented. Certified or low cost sensors measurements can be assimilated in the modelling system with a near real time approach.
The ELISE modelling system has been presented at the Air Quality 2016 conference held in Milano on March 14-18 2016
(see the presentation).
The Project
The ELISE modelling system has been developed by Simularia in the framework of the ELISE project (2014-2015) aimed at collecting and processing information about the environment in urban areas with a Living Lab approach.
Sensors
Low cost sensors to measure temperature, humidity and NO2 concentrations. A mobile application enables each user to access the data related to the personal daily routes. All sensors data are sent to a centralized server.
Atmospheric model
A system of models and post-processing tools is used to simulate the dispersion of pollutants at micro-scale on large urban areas.
Decision support
A powerful tool for decision makers to explore the NO2 concentrations enabling data driven decisions and what-if scenarios.
The partners involved in the project are:
Partially supported by "Bando regionale a sostegno di progetti di ricerca industriale e/o sviluppo sperimentale di applicazioni integrate e innovative in ambito INTERNET OF DATA - IoD" under POR/FESR 2007-2013 programme.
