Emissions ModElling and FoRecasting of Air quality in IreLanD
LIFE EMERALD was established to strengthen air quality management in Ireland and consisted of a collaboration between the Irish Environment Protection Agency (EPA) and their project partners. The goal was to ensure effective implementation of the EU Ambient Air Quality Directives and to greatly improve publicly available air quality information and raise awareness around the topic of Irish air quality.
Over the 3-year project VITO worked closely with the Irish EPA to establish Ireland’s first air quality nowcast and forecasting system. The modelling system builds on previous successful projects from other EU countries were VITO’s ATMOSYS modelling system has been implemented.
Using the OPAQ technology trained with historical air quality, land cover and altitude data for Ireland, Air Quality Index for Health (AQIH) maps are now available on airquality.ie on an hourly basis, based on real-time air quality and weather data. These maps supplement the Irish EPA’s existing air quality monitoring network, filling in the gaps between the stations to provide essential information on air quality for the whole country.
For each monitoring location and relevant pollutant, forecast models have also been trained using the same historical air quality and weather data. Resulting in air quality data up to 3 days in advance (today, tomorrow and the day after tomorrow), that is being used to alert citizens of upcoming pollution episodes.
During establishment of the services VITO’s experts worked alongside the EPA’s air quality experts and their IT operations team to ensure sustainability of the services after the project.
Next to the daily operational services, ATMO-Street has been configured with Irish emissions, measurement and weather data to calculate pollutant levels down to street level. The high-resolution model has been used to generate annual average air pollutant maps for 2019, 2021, 2022 and 2023. The model configurations for each year have been evaluated and confirmed as fit-for-purpose using data from the monitoring network and the Irish Clean Air Together citizen science campaigns.
Further details of the air quality forecast, hourly updated maps, and high-resolution annual maps are available at airquality.ie.
Within LIFE EMERALD several small studies were carried out to support establishment of the models and management of air quality in Ireland. Read on for information on these studies.
Year: 2021 – 2024
Project partners: Asthma Society Ireland, Department of Communications, Climate Action and the Environment (Government of Ireland), Health Service Executive Ireland, University College Cork , VITO
Project Website: Life Emerald
National and local air quality plans and policies
The Irish Department of Environment, Climate and Communications (DECC) was interested in how the modelling tools, namely ATMO-Street, could be used to assess the impact of national and local policies on air quality. Consequently, under the direction of Irene Cadogan, Assistant Principal Officer at DECC, several use cases were established to demonstrate the use of the model to assess how Irish climate action plans will impact air quality in 2030 and how the tools can be used to support local traffic management plans. As Irene stated in the project’s final layman’s report: "the project has helped DECC to understand the impacts of current policy and plan better for future policies. Providing a range of tools that will support Ireland’s Clean Air Strategy to bring about continuous improvements in air quality".
Improving residential solid fuel emissions data
It was noted during the project inception that the gridded residential emissions data that is available as input for the ATMO-Street model is of too low resolution (1 km) to capture the peaks that are often observed in the measurement stations. Which makes it too difficult to pinpoint which residential areas contribute most to the PM emissions. In two pilot studies, in Edenderry and Dungarvan, data from local PM10 sensor networks were used to explore the uncertainties in the residential emissions data, to understand how the residential emissions data could be improved to produce more reliable modelled PM10 maps in the future. This resulted in a proposed methodology that could be applied to improve the residential emissions data for other locations in Ireland.
Spatial representativeness study of the air quality monitoring network
Over the past few years, the European Commission - DG Environment has initiated studies to harmonise the methodologies for the definition of spatial representativeness in the context of air quality. This has resulted in the establishment of a FAIRMODE Working Group who are assessing the latest agreed approach (as of autumn 2023) that has been suggested by its members.
Using this methodology, a spatial representativeness study was conducted to assess how well Ireland’s air quality monitoring network monitors the full range of concentrations of air pollutants across the country.
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