Integrated Systems of Meso-Meteorological and Chemical Transport Models

Weather natural hazards, the environment and climate change are of concern to all of us. Especially, it is essential to understand how human activities might impact the nature. Hence, monitoring, research, and forecasting is of the outmost importance. Furthermore, climate change and pollution of the environment do not obey national borders; so, international collaboration on these issues is indeed extremely important.In the future, the increasing computer power and understanding of physical processes pave the way for developing integrated models of the Earth system and gives a possibility to include interactions between atmosphere, environment, climate, ocean, cryosphere and ecosystems.Therefore, development of integrated Numerical Weather Prediction (NWP) and Atmospheric Chemical Transport (ACT) models is an important step in this strate­gic direction and it is a promising way for future atmospheric simulation systems leading to a new generation of models. The EC COST Action 728 “Enhancing Mesoscale Meteorological Modelling Capabilities for Air Pollution and Dispersion Applications” (2004-2009) is aimed at identifying the requirements and propose recommendations for the European strategy for integrated mesoscale NWP-ACT modelling capability.DMT strongly supports this development. Almost 10 years ago DMI initiated developing an on-line integrated NWP-ACT modelling system, now called Enviro- HIRLAM (Environment - High Resolution Limited Area Model), which includes two-way interactions between meteorology and air pollution for NWP applications and chemical weather forecasting. Recently we also initiated organisation of the Chemical branch in the HIRLAM international consortium (http://hirlam.org), where this model is considered as the baseline model. The Enviro-HIRLAM became an international community model starting January 2009 with several external European organisations joining the research and development team (e.g., from the University of Copenhagen, Denmark; University of Tartu, Estonia; University of Vilnius, Lithuania; Russian State Hydro-Meteorological University; Tomsk State University, Russia; Odessa State Environmental University, Ukraine) with new coming participants.During 2002-2005, DMI led EC FP5 project FUMAPEX (http://fumapex.dmi. dk), which developed a new generation Integrated Urban Air Quality Information and Forecasting System and implemented such a system in six European cities.