NEAR REAL TIME EVALUATION OF THE SPANISH AIR QUALITY FORECAST SYSTEM: CALIOPE

Abstract: The most recently adopted European Directive on Ambient Air Quality and Cleaner Air For Europe (Dir. 2008/50/EC) promotes the use of air quality models to provide geographically distributed information about air quality levels. It also quantifies the modelling uncertainty objectives for the regulated pollutants (O3, NO2, SO2, PM10 and PM2.5 among others) Therefore it is fundamental to establish the reliability of the currently used models to help decision makers and final users. The WRF-ARW/HERMES-EMEP/CMAQ/BSC-DREAM8b modelling system provides high resolution air quality predictions for 48h in Europe –EU12- (12x12 km2, 1h), the Iberian Peninsula and Balearic Islands –IP4- (4x4 km2, 1h) and Canary Islands –CAN2- (2x2 km2, 1h) since July 2007, under the framework of the CALIOPE project (Baldasano et al., 2008