Improving air quality modelling systems by using on-line wild land fire forecasting tools coupled into WRF/Chem simulations over Europe

To simulate air pollution over Europe, we use the regional meteorological-chemistry transport model WRF-Chem. In this paper, we show the impact by using two different forest fire emissions inventories and how the coupled atmosphere-fire-chemical WRF-FIRE-Chem improves the simulation and forecasting of the smoke emissions, dispersion and effects on air quality, locally. Two fire emissions inventories have been used in this experiment. The Fire Inventory from NCAR (FINN) and the Integrated monitoring and modelling System for wildland FIRES project (IS4FIRES). Fire emissions calculated with the FINN inventory have been injected into the atmosphere using the WRF-Chem plume rise model. Fire emissions from the IS4FIRES have been used using vertical injection profiles provided by the inventory itself. We show differences between the final concentrations of PM10 and O3 when using the two fire emission inventories (FINN, IS4FIRES) and without fire emissions (NOFIRE) covering a domain of Europa. On-line emissions generated by these fires have been aggregated to a 23 km grid cell to be used as input to the WRF/Chem model. The results from the simulations with and without simulated fire emissions were compared with observed air quality data from the Airbase database.