Life Hungairy

Strengthening Air Quality Modelling Capacity to Support Air Quality Plans in Hungary

VITO’s air quality scenario application ATMO-Plan has been extended with a residential emissions functionality and configured together with the air quality emissions and modelling team at the Hungarian Meteorological Service (HMET) to strengthen air quality assessment capacity in Hungary.

Participating local municipalities are using the application to guide them on which measures will best help them in reducing their ambient particulate matter (PM) and nitrogen dioxide (NO₂) concentration levels so that they conform to the limits as set out in the EU's Ambient Air Quality Directive. The application mainly targets the assessment of measures aimed at reducing traffic and residential heating emissions in Hungary. However, it can also be used to assess the impact of industrial emission changes across a municipality.

The application was customised to the needs of the municipalities in an iterative co-creative way supported by HMET and VITO. The first phases of the project (2019 – 2022) focused on understanding the requirements of the local municipalities regarding air quality assessments, plans and local measures. This took the form of workshops and helping them understand the role of air quality modelling in air quality planning. This led to specific training requirements for the local municipality experts as well as a technical specification for the new residential emissions functionality to be built within ATMO-Plan. In addition, discussions were held on the sustainability of the application as HMET would need to update the application annually to ensure the underlying baseline data is representative for continued use over the next years.

 
Over the next phase of the project (2022 – 2023) ATMO-Plan Hungary was iteratively customized, tested and demonstrated to the municipalities by VITO and HMET. In 2023 the first version was installed at HMET, who gradually took over operation and maintenance of the application.

 
In this current phase (2024 – 2026) of the project VITO continue to support HMET in updating the underlying data as well as supporting them and their users in setting up cases in ATMO-Plan to support their local air quality plans.

 
At the request of the HMET emissions team, VITO also set-up a spatial emissions gridding tool to support them in preparing gridded emissions in line with CLRTAP reporting to the EMEP Centre for Emission Inventories and Projections (CEIP) , and to improve preparation of the spatial emissions used in their air quality models for supporting air quality policy at a national level. This tool is based on VITO’s EISSA software VITO’s EISSA software for inventorying and mapping all relevant emissions caused by major sources to air.