The atmospheric pollution forecast is a challenging target, which is not far to be reached by the scientific tools developed in the last years. The research objective is to better understand the processes that affect the air quality and their impact on meteorology and climate; the practical objective is to produce tools for the governance and support to decisions.
The growing public interest solicited new European economic resources towards such end. In particular EU finances the Integrated Project GEMS (Global and regional Earth-system Monitoring using Satellite and in-situ data), coordinated by ECMWF (the European Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecasts), oriented towards the chemical weather forecast.
The Institute for Atmospheric Sciences and Climate participates to this project with the model for study and forecast the atmospheric composition BOLCHEM (http://www.isac.cnr.it/bolchem), developed in the Institute.
At present BOLCHEM runs operatively over an European domain together with different models and produces 3 day forecasts of the main gaseous pollutants. These forecasts are available on the site http://www.ecmwf.int/products/forecasts/d/inspect/catalog/research/gems/raq/forecasts/plot_CNR
It is planned to make BOLCHEM operative in different centres; in particular, it has been signed an agreement with the Department of Physics of the University of Genova.
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