A System for Forecast of Background Air Pollution Levels over Bulgaria: Description and Validation

Both, the current level of air pollution studies and social needs in the country, are in a stage mature enough for creating Bulgarian Chemical Weather Forecasting and Information System. For the purpose, a project is funded by the National Scientific Fund aiming at designing and setting up such a system able to provide timely, informative and reliable forecast products tailored to the needs of various users. The system is foreseen to provide in real time forecast of the spatial/temporal Air Quality behaviour for the country and (with higher resolution) for selected sub-regions and cities on the base of the weather forecast and national emission inventory. The system is aiming at integration within the European Chemical Weather Forecast community, utilizing knowledge and data, as well as the “model ensemble” possibilities. The country-scale part of the system is designed and is being tested. It is based on the US EPA Models-3 System: MM5, CMAQ and SMOKE (partly). The meteorological pre-processor MM5 is drive by ALADIN output, ALADIN being the national numerical weather forecast tool. In this stage, the emission input exploits the high-resolution TNO emission inventory with tendency to make use of local data. The boundary conditions are prepared by a similar system running operationally in Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece (AUTH). Special interface is created to retrieve in real time the AUTH-system forecasts producing boundary files uploaded to dedicated server in Bulgaria. In the presentation, detailed description of the System’s structure will be given together with first results of its testing.