Forecasting Urban Air Quality
1The University of Jordan, Faculty of Science, Department of Physics, Amman 11942, Jordan
2Department of Applied Environmental Science, Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden
3International Laboratory for Air Quality and Health, Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Australia
Forecasting Urban Air Quality
Description
Air pollution has severe impacts on both the environment around us and our health. Urban areas are the places of high concentration of air pollution and human population; thus, it is essential to forecast the urban air quality (UAQ). Forecasting the UAQ provides essential information to the public and is commonly used by city authorities to take actions to reduce the risk of being exposed to severe episodes of air pollution. Prediction of UAQ and its regional impacts on the environment and human health is extremely challenging and of great interest. The EU directive (2008/50/EC) stated that Member States shall forecast air quality and inform the public about expected exceedances and alert thresholds. Forecasting the UAQ requires long-term databases on the temporal-spatial variation of air pollutants, weather data, local anthropogenic emissions, long-range transport of air pollution, and biogenic pollutants and episodes.
The main focus of this special issue will be on the development of methodologies for forecasting urban air quality. A successful method can provide the public with accurate air pollution forecasts for the coming few days. Such methods can be semiempirical statistical models, with emphasis on physical processes and theories, or data assimilation where the model itself is developed in a way to learn from the long-term databases. A vital application of such models is their implementation in regional and large-scale models that are employed in climate change models. This special issue is foreseen as an international forum for researchers to summarize the most recent developments and ideas in the field. It welcomes interdisciplinary papers that link the urban air pollution to its sources with emphasis on the dependence on meteorological conditions. Potential topics include, but are not limited to:
- Gaseous pollutant concentrations
- Particulate matter (mass/number concentrations, chemical composition, and size distribution)
- Anthropogenic biogenic emissions
- Impact of UAQ on a changing climate, long-range transport, health effects, and impacts on environment
- Statistical models/methodologies including data assimilation, scale interactions, ensemble forecasts, semiempirical, and so forth
- Physical, chemical, and meteorological processes related to UAQ
The special issue especially welcomes papers that involve meteorological data or simulations as critical components of the study.
Before submission authors should carefully read over the journal's Author Guidelines, which are located at http://www.hindawi.com/journals/amet/guidelines/. Prospective authors should submit an electronic copy of their complete manuscript through the journal Manuscript Tracking System at http://mts.hindawi.com/ according to the following timetable: