From weather forecasting to air quality, the challenge of the European Cams2-40-bis project
A consortium of 11 partners is in the field. For Italia, Enea is participating with the Minni system
From daily weather forecasts to air quality (with a spatial resolution of up to 3 kilometres), including pollen forecasts using satellite data for better allergy prevention.
These are the main novelties of the new European project CAMS2-40-bis of the Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service, through which the European Centre for Medium-term Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) will continue to finance air quality research activities conducted by a consortium of 11 partners after the previous five-year CAMS2-40 programme. An initiative in which Italia participates with ENEA and which is joined by France, Norway, Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden, Finland, Denmark, Poland and Spain with their models.
Pollution data
"The project will produce and make available data on atmospheric pollution in Europe and," emphasise ENEA, "in parallel, it will work on the implementation of forecasting systems, updating them to the best scientific practices and experimenting with forecasts with a spatial definition that will be increased from the current 10 to 3-5 kilometres. . The model used by Italia is the Minni system which, together with the other 10 models, contributes to up to 5-day forecasts of air quality and pollen concentration in Europe. Adding up the amount of information made public results in a daily average of 80 billion data points.
The Minni System
"Since 2022," emphasises Massimo D'Isidoro, researcher in the Sustainability Department and project leader, "Italia has been participating in the European Copernicus air quality programme with the Enea Minni system, which is considered among the most reliable in Europe thanks to the high performance of the Cresco supercomputer.
19 pollutants under control
All of the consortium's models use and process the same data: the pollutant emissions provided by Copernicus and the high-resolution weather forecasts from Ecmwf. The results of the eleven systems are then combined into a single product called ensemble (processed by Météo-France and Ineris and made available free of charge in the Atmosphere Data Store), which covers a range of 19 pollutants, including ozone, nitrogen dioxide, sulphur dioxide and PM2.5 and PM10 particulates.
