Air quality forecasts provide valuable information for daily decision-making, and are often presented on a public website. This type of information can for example be used by people with respiratory problems, making it possible for them to limit their exposure during episodes with high levels of contamination.

The Aircast module allows statistical adjustment of deterministic forecasts of air pollution. The process of creating a forecast is briefly described below:

  • A regional forecast model produces a hh hour forecast every nn hour.
  • Some forecasted substances could be extracted directly from the regional forecast and directly stored in the time series database.
  • Forecasted temperature, wind speed and wind direction and cloudiness are passed through a meteorological pre-processor, which calculates all parameters necessary to run a local scale model. These parameters are then stored in the Airviro time series database.
  • A hh hour deterministic forecast simulation is then performed by using an local scale dispersion model and a local emission database.
  • A statistical adjustment of the deterministic forecast is then made forming a statistical forecast (SF), including a field adjustment process and the result is then stored in the result database.