Downscaling WRF-Chem: Analyzing Urban Air Quality in Barcelona City

Vidal, Veronica; Cortés, Ana, Badia, Alba; Villalba, Gara

ACCESS at Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics) (2023), 14073 LNCS, pp. 61–73

Improving air quality in highly polluted cities is a challenge for today’s society. Most of the proposed strategies include green policies that aim to introduce green infrastructures helping to improve air quality. To design new cities with more green infrastructures, the WRF-Chem model is used to analyze the evolution of the most common pollutants and their dispersion due to the meteorology of the moment. Most of the studies, however, are off an urban scale (hundreds of meters of resolution), and those cases that simulate the meteorology at this resolution need to consider the city’s morphology. Using the city of Barcelona as a case study, this paper confirms that the modeling methodology used up to now must be reviewed to design green cities. Certain limitations of the WRF-Chem model have been analyzed, including the BEP-BEM as an urban canopy layer, and the reasons for such limitations are discussed.