EMMA: An air quality operational model for regional and urban environs - the Madrid experience

Mesoscale air quality models are an important tool to forecast and analyze the air quality on regional an urban areas. In the last years an increased interest has been found from the decision-makers in these types of software tools. The complexity of such a model has grown exponentially with the increase of computer power. Nowadays medium workstations can run operational versions of these modelling systems successfully. In this contribution we present a complex mesoscale air quality model which has been installed in the Environmental Office of the Madrid Community (Spain) in order to forecast accurately the ozone, nitrogen dioxide and sulphur dioxide air concentrations in a 3D domain centred on the Madrid city. The challenging scientific matters to be solved in order to develop an operational version of the ANA model are described in these contributions. Results are encouraging to improve the version already installed in order to improve the accuracy of predictions.