ELISE logo

The ELISE Atmospheric Modelling System
An innovative AMS to monitor air quality in urban areas

ELISE AMS is a complex set of models, pre and post processing codes, providing hourly updated and high-resolution forecasts of air pollution in urban areas.
The system is running since April 2015 on the city of Torino, Italy computing hourly NO2 concentration fields at street level.

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Microscale

Microscale simulations with horizontal resolution of 6 m are run on a 3D grid taking into account city buildings: about 52000 obstacles with a maximum height of 167 m.
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Large urban area

The modelling system currently runs on an extended portion (6 x 7.2 km2) of the city of Torino, Italy.
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Emissions

Bottom-up NOx traffic emissions on the main roads are complemented with diffuse emissions assigned to secondary streets, for a total of about 13000 linear sources.
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Meteorology

Meteorological fields are obtained by PSWIFT, a parallelized 3D wind field model for complex terrain which produces a mass-consistent wind field using data from the large scale forecast system QualeAria.
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Dispersion

Pollutants dispersion is modelled through a lagrangian 3D model (Parallel Micro Spray) allowing for multi-tiles decomposition of large domain on multi-core machines (Aria Technologies - Arianet).
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Background

Other emissions and pollution coming from outside the domain are integrated by means of background NO, NO2 and O3 fields from the QualeAria forecast system.
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Validation

Comparison with different institutional monitoring sites (background and traffic) shows how well ELISE is capable to reproduce spatial inhomogeneities in NO2 levels typical of the urban environment.
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CPU efficiency

The ELISE AMS is running on a regular workstation with just 16 Intel™ Xeon™ computational cores. It is also able to run on low cost and energy efficient ARM clusters.
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Adaptability

Modelling of other pollutants, such as PM, benzene, etc. can be easily implemented. Certified or low cost sensors measurements can be assimilated in the modelling system with a near real time approach.

The ELISE modelling system has been presented at the Air Quality 2016 conference held in Milano on March 14-18 2016
(see the presentation).

The Project

The ELISE modelling system has been developed by Simularia in the framework of the ELISE project (2014-2015) aimed at collecting and processing information about the environment in urban areas with a Living Lab approach.

Sensors

Sensors

Low cost sensors to measure temperature, humidity and NO2 concentrations. A mobile application enables each user to access the data related to the personal daily routes. All sensors data are sent to a centralized server.
Model

Atmospheric model

A system of models and post-processing tools is used to simulate the dispersion of pollutants at micro-scale on large urban areas.
Decision support tool

Decision support

A powerful tool for decision makers to explore the NO2 concentrations enabling data driven decisions and what-if scenarios.

The partners involved in the project are:

Logo Aizoon
Logo CSP
Logo Politecnico di Torino
Logo Fondazione ISI
Logo Trustech
Logo Simularia

Partially supported by "Bando regionale a sostegno di progetti di ricerca industriale e/o sviluppo sperimentale di applicazioni integrate e innovative in ambito INTERNET OF DATA - IoD" under POR/FESR 2007-2013 programme.

EUROPE POR/FESR
Repubblica Italiana
Regione Piemonte