Implementing the wrf-chem modeling system to investigate the interactions between air quality and meteorology

Air quality managers seek to protect public health through control policies and more stringent air quality standards for both short and long term situations (Jacob and Winner, 2009). As a result megacities has been shown a significant decrease in concentrations of primary pollutants (e.g. nitrogen oxides, sulphur dioxide, carbon monoxide, volatile organic compounds and heavy metal) over the last decades and they will certainly continue to decrease in the future as a result of energy choices and social and economic concerns. On the contrary, secondary pollutants, such as ozone and particulate matter, have revealed a fewer reduction in air concentrations despite a striking decrease in the emission trend of their precursors. The goal of this study is to build a comprehensive modeling environment in order to explore the main problems related to the representation of air pollution events, especially in high-emissive areas (e.g. Italy and the Po valley), thus reducing the uncertainties in air quality simulations by improving the model reconstruction of meteorological processes through the state-of-the-art air quality and meteorological model WRF-Chem.