GEM-PP: a GIS EMissions Pre-Processor to ingest European emission inventory (EMEP/CORINAIR) into photochemical transport models

Air quality simulations and forecasting using photochemical transport models require detailed information of the emissions in the area under investigation. Due to the wide range of space and time scales involved in the physical and chemical processes of air pollution phenomena, a need to perform air quality simulations over larger regions, at finer grid resolutions, using more emissions sources, and for more purposes (e.g., ozone, particulate, toxics) has developed. Geographic information systems (GIS) have become important decision-making tools for location information of real-world objects and phenomena in the context of air quality, as they allow for the management of geographic information in a flexible and efficient manner. In the past few years, several open source (OS) GIS solutions have emerged, permitting the development of complex GIS projects without requiring commercial closed-source software. In this paper, we present GEM-PP, an emissions pre-processor for air quality models developed using OS-GIS technologies. This tool elaborates the emission inventories according to the coordination of information on air emissions (CORINAIR) methodology, and generates gridded, hourly emissions in a format consistent with air quality models. To test the functionality of the developed GEM-PP, the pre-processor has been applied to reproduce emission patterns and the distribution of air pollutants over the Apulia region in southeast Italy. The data has been preprocessed to be input into two commonly used dispersion models, WRF-Chem and CALGRID.