RECURRENCE OF AIR QUALITY FOR THE CITY OF SOFIA FOR 2013 AND 2014

Bulgarian Geophysical Journal, 2018, Vol. 41, DOI: https://doi.org/10.34975/bgj-2018.41.5

G. Gadzhev

Abstract:
The air is the living environment of human beings and obviously the atmospheric composition has a great importance for the quality of life and human health. Air Quality (AQ) is a key element for the well-being and quality of life of European citizens. The objectives of the present work is performing reliable, comprehensive and detailed studies of the impact of lower atmosphere composition on the quality of life and health risks for the population in Sofia city. Lately, together with the numerical weather forecast, in many European countries Systems for Chemical Weather Forecast operate, Chemical Weather being understood as concentration distribution of key pollutants in a particular area and its changes during some forecast period. In Bulgaria, a prototype of such a system was built in the frame of a project with the National Science Fund. It covers a relatively small domain including Bulgaria that requires using chemical boundary conditions from similar foreign systems. As far as this data is prepared abroad and transferred by Internet, many failures took place during the operation of the system. To avoid this problem, a new version of the system was built on the base of the nesting approach. This version is realized on five domains: Europe, Balkan Peninsula, Bulgaria, Sofia Municipality and Sofia City with increasing space resolution – from 81 km (Europe) to 1 km (Sofia City). For the Mother domain (Europe) climatic boundary conditions are applied. All other domains take their boundary conditions from the senior one. Computations start automatically at 00 UTC every day and the forecast period is 3 days. The System is based on the well-known models WRF (Meso-meteorological Model) and US EPA dispersion model CMAQ (Chemical Transport Model). As emission input the TNO data is used for the two biggest domains. For the 3 Bulgarian domains the current emission inventory prepared by Bulgarian environmental authorities is exploited

Keywords:
Air Quality Indices, air quality, quality of life, health risks.

Acknowledgements:
This work was supported by Contract No D01-161/28.08.2018 (Project “National Geoinformation Center (NGIC)” financed by the National Roadmap for Scientific Infrastructure 2017-2023 and by Bulgarian National Science Fund (grant DN-04/2/13.12.2016).
Special thanks are due to US EPA and US NCEP for providing free-of-charge data and software and to the Netherlands Organization for Applied Scientific research (TNO) for providing the high-resolution European anthropogenic emission inventory.

Author information:
Author: Georgi Gadzhev
E-mail: ggadjev@geophys.bas.bg
Affiliation: National Institute of Geophysics, Geodesy and Geography – BAS, str. Acad. G. Bonchev, bl. 3, Sofia 1113, Bulgaria

How to cite:
Gadzhev, G. (2019). RECURRENCE OF AIR QUALITY FOR THE CITY OF SOFIA FOR 2013 AND 2014. Bulgarian Geophysical Journal, Vol. 41, p. 46-58. https://doi.org/10.34975/BGJ-2018.41.5