Health Impacts of the Urban Climate and Air Quality under Two Different IPCC Scenarios

The objective of this research is to quantify the future (2030, 2050 and 2100) short-term health effects of the global climate over five European Cities: Madrid, Antwerp, Milan, Helsinki and London with very high spatial resolution (200 meters) respect to the present (2011) under two IPCC climate projections RCP 4.5 (stabilization emission scenario) and RCP 8,5 (increase emission scenario). To go from global resolution to high urban resolution an integrated modeling system with feasible computational costs was used. We apply a mixed dynamical-diagnostic approach: from the global scale to regional (25 km. over Europe) using the dynamical WRF-Chem model and from the regional to urban scale with the diagnostic meteorological model CALMET and CMAQ is used to downscale the air quality data. The 8.5 scenario is characterized by temperature increases from 2050, reaching the maximum impact in 2100, especially in Madrid and Milan with large increases. The biggest impacts of health effects by the pollutants are Respiratory mortality due to O3 (Antwerp, Milan and London), Hospital admissions due to O3 (Helsinki) and Cardiovascular mortality by PM10 (Madrid).