Abstract:

PREV'AIR is an operationnal system for air quality (AQ) monitoring and forecasting. It was launched in 2003 under the supervision of the French Minstry of Environment and has been operated since then by INERIS, the national institute for industrial environement and risks. It is a collaborative project between several public institutions: ADEME, INERIS, CNRS and Météo France. The general objective of the system is to generate daily an up-to-date and relevant information on air quality, that is freely accessible everyday on the Internet (http://www.prevair.org) and filed in a database. The key idea of PREV'AIR is to rely both on modeling tools and on observation data. The outputs of the system are i) daily AQ forecasting maps - up to three days ahead - for ozone, nitrogen dioxides and particles, at the European and French scales; ii) daily AQ monitoring maps integrating both modeling results and near-real time ground observation data, refreshed several times a day when an air pollution episode occurs. In addition to these maps, iii) numerical forecast data are delivered to local AQ management associations, enabling them to produce their own forecasts at a more accurate resolution. The operationnal set-up of the PREV'AIR system will be presented as well as what has been learnt from it after three years of operational use, regarding its performances and also the evolution of AQ at the European and national scales. Although the regions of interest of the PREV'AIR system are Europe and France, it is transposable to other regions of the world.

Presentation: http://www.cleanairnet.org/baq2006/1757/docs/SW4_1.ppt