NEW DELHI: The India Meteorological Department has operationalised an advanced high-resolution air quality early warning system for the national capital as well as a separate one for the country, the Ministry of Earth Sciences said on Wednesday.
A very high-resolution city scale model 'INFUSER' (ENvironmental information FUsion SERvice) for Delhi sas been operationalised to identify the air pollution hotspots and pollution up to the street level, the MoES said.
Pollution can be captured better with this model, VK Soni, head of the Environment Monitoring Research Centre of IMD noted. Delhi has about 40 air quality monitoring systems. "We monitor traffic congestion at a 5-metre resolution, and land use and land cover at 30-metre resolution. This will give us better forecasting," Soni added.
The air quality forecast model System for Integrated Modelling of Atmospheric Composition (SILAM) for the country has been further improved by implementing global emission inventories CAMS-GLOB v2.1 supplemented with EDGAR v4.3.2 for coarse and mineralfine anthropogenic particulate matter at 10 kilometres resolution.
"This will reduce the uncertainty in the forecast. Major uncertainty comes from sources of emission we don’t know the actual sources, another uncertainty comes from meteorology," Soni said. He explained that earlier, the chemistry transport model coupled with the meteorological forecast model was being used.
So, whatever uncertainties regarding prediction were there in the latter model, also came with the former. SILAM and ENFUSER have been developed in technical collaboration with the Finnish Meteorological Institute (FMI). The speciality of the ENFUSER is the high utilisation of measurement data.