Sensitivity to spatial resolution of modeling systems designing air quality control policies

Different approaches are available in literature to support the modeling of “what if” outcomes and the development of strategies, namely scenario analysis, cost-benefit technique, cost-effectiveness technique and multi-objective optimization. All such methods use atmospheric modeling simulations at an appropriate spatial resolution to compute different air quality indexes. This paper analyses the sensitivity of control policies to the spatial resolution of the air quality model, when a multi-objective approach is considered. This assessment is useful for balancing on one hand the request for greater detail in the air quality modeling description and in the strength of the results, and on the other the heavy computational demand required by optimization approaches. The domain selected to implement this sensitivity analysis is the Northern Italy domain, an area often affected by high exposure to PM10, due to very high anthropogenic emissions and particular meteorological conditions.