Impact of air quality model settings for the evaluation of emission reduction strategies to curb air pollution.

For air quality management, while numerical tools are mainly evaluated to assess their performances on absolute concentrations, this study assesses the impact of their settings on the robustness of model responses to emission reduction strategies for the main criteria pollutants. The effect of the spatial resolution and chemistry schemes is investigated. We show that whereas the spatial resolution is not a crucial setting (except for NO), the chemistry scheme has more impact, particularly when assessing hourly values of the absolute potential of concentrations.

Reducing biomass burning is key to decrease PM exposure in European cities.

Throughout the world, ambient fine particulate matter (PM) is the environmental factor that poses the greatest risk to health and most European citizens continue to be exposed to PM levels well above World Health Organization guidelines. Here we present a comprehensive PM modelling-based source allocation assessment in 708 urban areas in Europe. The results show that urban cores, together with their commuting zones, contribute an average of 22% to urban PM concentrations levels.