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Downscaling WRF-Chem: Analyzing Urban Air Quality in Barcelona City

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Computational Science – ICCS 2023 (ICCS 2023)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCS,volume 14073))

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Abstract

Improving air quality in highly polluted cities is a challenge for today’s society. Most of the proposed strategies include green policies that aim to introduce green infrastructures helping to improve air quality. To design new cities with more green infrastructures, the WRF-Chem model is used to analyze the evolution of the most common pollutants and their dispersion due to the meteorology of the moment. Most of the studies, however, are off an urban scale (hundreds of meters of resolution), and those cases that simulate the meteorology at this resolution need to consider the city’s morphology. Using the city of Barcelona as a case study, this paper confirms that the modeling methodology used up to now must be reviewed to design green cities. Certain limitations of the WRF-Chem model have been analyzed, including the BEP-BEM as an urban canopy layer, and the reasons for such limitations are discussed.

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Acknowledgements

This work has been granted by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation MCIN AEI/10.13039/501100011033 under contract PID2020-113614RB-C21, by the Spanish government under grant PRE2018-085425 and by the Catalan government under contract 2021 SGR 00574.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Departament d’Arquitectura de Computadors i Sistemes Operatius, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain

    Veronica Vidal & Ana Cortés

  2. Institut de Ciència i Tecnologia Ambientals, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain

    Veronica Vidal, Alba Badia & Gara Villalba

Authors
  1. Veronica Vidal
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  2. Ana Cortés
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  3. Alba Badia
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  4. Gara Villalba
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Veronica Vidal .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Czech Technical University in Prague, Prague, Czech Republic

    Jiří Mikyška

  2. University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

    Clélia de Mulatier

  3. AGH University of Science and Technology, Krakow, Poland

    Maciej Paszynski

  4. University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

    Valeria V. Krzhizhanovskaya

  5. University of Tennessee at Knoxville, Knoxville, TN, USA

    Jack J. Dongarra

  6. University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

    Peter M.A. Sloot

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Vidal, V., Cortés, A., Badia, A., Villalba, G. (2023). Downscaling WRF-Chem: Analyzing Urban Air Quality in Barcelona City. In: Mikyška, J., de Mulatier, C., Paszynski, M., Krzhizhanovskaya, V.V., Dongarra, J.J., Sloot, P.M. (eds) Computational Science – ICCS 2023. ICCS 2023. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 14073. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-35995-8_5

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-35995-8_5

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  • Online ISBN: 978-3-031-35995-8

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