Urban Tool for Air Quality
UTAQ (Urban Tool for Air Quality) is a project developed by TerrAria and funded by ECMWF (European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts). UTAQ aims to provide a mathematical tool developed as a web application for forecasting air quality at a high resolution (10-50 m) urban scale and calibrated on the individual air quality monitoring stations present in Milan. UTAQ uses the air quality data provided by the Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service (CAMS) as background concentrations.
| Project type: CAMS_95I – ECMWF (European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts) Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service on behalf of the European Commission. Budget: 78’210 Euros Duration: 2018 – 2020 Number and Partner involved: TerrAria s.r.l. Role: Sole contractor Project website: www.utaq.eu |
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The European Union’s air quality standards, adopted by the Member States in 2008 (2008/50/EC), set out a short-term action plan that each Member State establishes indicating the measures to be taken in the short term in order to reduce the risk or duration of exceeding concentration limits for the main pollutants affecting urban areas (NO2, PM10 and PM2.5). This approach aims to protect the population from concentration peaks and promotes the prevention of severe episodes through the implementation of air quality forecast systems. In order to comply with short-term limit values set by legislation and reduce hazardous concentration levels, emission reduction actions must be planned at least one or two days in advance. In addition, according to EU directives, local authorities must provide information to the public on the state of air quality and the expected trend for the following days. TerrAria with the UTAQ project responded to these requirements and at the same time fulfilled the request of the CAMS calls for tenders which asked for the configuration and demonstration of downstream applications using one or more CAMS products as input, also known as ‘Use Cases’.
The project saw the development of a web application, also called UTAQ, and the mobile application, which supports urban planners and municipal agencies in estimating the air quality in their urban areas and assessing the short-term response to manage emergency conditions in the event of exceedances of normative reference values.
THE ROLE OF TERRARIA
TerrAria was responsible for the development of the UTAQ system (web application and Mobile App) in the first phase of the project, while in the second part it was responsible for the dissemination and commercialization of the system: in early 2020 UTAQ was tested by AMAT on the city of Milan.
