Air quality ensemble forecast coupling ARPEGE and CHIMERE over Western Europe

The quality enhancement of the results encountered on numerical weather prediction ensemble runs has encouraged the air quality modellers’ community to test the same methodology to foresee air pollutants concentrations in the atmosphere. In air quality forecast it is important to know in advance if the event exceedences of a certain threshold value will happen in order to implement mitigation measures concerning air pollutant emission. The ensemble approach allows giving this information within a probability range. Within this work both perturbation on the circulation model and the chemical transport model will be implemented. The ensemble system is composed by the numerical weather prediction model ARPEGE, the meteorological model MM5 and the chemical transport model CHIMERE. Meteorological perturbations will be addressed firstly by a set of ten ensemble members derived by the ARPEGE model, plus a control run, which will force MM5 simulations. Since the concept of air pollution ensemble forecast is not the same than the one for meteorology, we propose here an original approach for the chemistry-transport model perturbations based on previously done CHIMERE sensitivities studies: focus will be made on plausible emissions scenarios and different daily emissions profiles, boundary layer evolution, vertical mixing and photolysis rates. The ensemble based simulations will cover July and August 2006, each includes the heat wave period that influenced the weather and air quality conditions of central Europe.