UTAQ (Urban Tool for Air Quality) is a web application for urban-scale air quality assessment, developed in the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF)-funded project of the same name. The application and the project fit into the context of reducing pollutant concentrations in line with European policies. In fact, the European Union’s air quality standards, adopted by the Member States in 2008 (2008/50/EC), define a short-term action plan that each Member State draws up indicating the measures to be taken in the short term in order to reduce the risk or duration of such exceedance of concentration limits for the main pollutants affecting urban areas (NO2, PM10 and PM2.5).
This modelling approach aims to protect the population from peak concentrations and promotes the prevention of severe episodes through the implementation of air quality prediction systems. To meet the short-term limit values set by legislation and reduce hazardous concentration levels, emission reduction actions and air quality policies 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 status of air quality and the foreseeable trend for the following days.
TerrAria with the UTAQ project has responded to these needs while also meeting the demand of CAMS calls for the configuration and demonstration of downstream applications using one or more CAMS products as input, also known as “Use Cases.” UTAQ was also used for the evaluation of traffic scenarios in the Sustainable Mobility Urban Plan of the Metropolitan City of Turin and for the Sustainable Logistics Urban Plan of the Metropolitan City of Florence.
Product functionality
UTAQ enables urban planners and municipal agencies to have an estimate of air quality in their urban areas and evaluate the short-term response to manage emergency conditions in case of exceedances of normative reference values. To support government decision makers, the new UTAQ tool produces high resolution air quality maps with respect to the current and forecast situation for the next 4 days; these are high-resolution maps of total emissions and average concentrations for urban areas.
UTAQ uses air quality data provided by the Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service (CAMS) as background concentrations.
UTAQ is also a mobile App that helps authorities communicate adopted urban strategies and air quality forecasts to city residents and helps prevent peak pollution exposure for “sensitive” citizens (e.g., children, asthmatics…) by providing them with the spatial and temporal variation of air quality either based on their location (via GPS) or desired route (i.e., discovering the least polluted trip).
UTAQ has been piloted by AMAT (Agenzia Mobilità Ambiente e Territorio) on the city of Milan.
