Life Hungairy

Strengthening Air Quality Modelling Facilities in Hungary

VITO’s ATMO-Plan emissions reduction scenario application is being configured together with the air quality emissions and modelling team at the Hungarian Meteorological Service (OMSZ) to strengthen capacity in the country.

Participating local municipalities will use the application to guide them on which measures will help them best in reaching their particulate matter (PM) and Nitrogen Dioxide (NO2) targets as many areas on in exceedance. The application will mainly be used to assess measures aimed at reducing traffic and residential heating emissions. It can also be used to assess the impact of industrial emission changes across a municipality.

The application is being customized to the needs of the municipalities in an iterative co-creative way that is being led by the Herman Ottó Institute Nonprofit Ltd., together with OMSZ and VITO. The implementation process is well underway. The emission scenario functionalities for residential emissions is currently being tested by the end users and VITO are assisting OMSZ in setting up the IT environment at OMSZ in which the application will be hosted from the next phase of the project onwards. From the next phase onwards (2023-2024), full control of the application will be transferred to OMSZ.

At the request of the OMSZ emissions team, VITO has 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 for inventorying and mapping all relevant emissions caused by major sources to air.