Air quality modelling at regional scale using WRF/Chem and a GIS based system for emission inventory in southeast Italy

Air quality simulation and forecasting is a complex problem that involves the knowledge of meteorological factors, chemical processes and emission inventories. In the real atmosphere all of these aspects are coupled in an intricate pattern, with time scales that may be much less than the scales involved only in meteorology. Another crucial point is the estimation of the emission inventory that must be very accurate when dealing with reactive pollutants like Ozone and Aerosols. The emission factors for Apulia Region (south-east corner of Italy) are used to prepare an emission inventory that will be computed and stored in databases of a GIS. GIS is used as the main component of the system for capturing, storing, checking and manipulating data that are spatially referenced. In particular our GIS approach is based on the use of Open-Sources GIS technologies (GRASS Project and PosrgreSQL with PostGIS extension). A preliminary simulation with the pollutant transport model WRF/Chem in a selected period is shown for SO2 tracer. The utilization of a GIS based system to get the grid-emissions seems to be a promising useful method to investigate air-quality at regional scale.