Marco Deserti

Regione Emilia-Romagna

In this paper, an operational forecasting and daily assessment system of air quality is presented. This new system is thought of as a Copernicus-CAMS downstream national service, able to develop and implement a service for air quality forecasting and monitoring in the Italian domain, running every day on the National territory. The system is being...

The Po Valley (Northern Italy) represents an important exceedance zone of the air-quality limit values for PM (particulate matter), NO2 (nitrogen dioxide) and O3 (ozone). This area covers the territory of most Italian northern regions and includes several urban agglomerates, such as Milan, Turin, Venice and Bologna. The area is densely populated an...

An Evaluation of the Health Impact has been carried out in the context of the Strategic Environmental Evaluation belonging to the next Regional Air Quality Plan 2014-2020 (PAIR2020); this work is meant to estimate the health effects deriving from the decrease of PM10 concentration in the air. In this purpose, it has been used a formula established...

In last decades, air pollution modelling assumed a key role for the definition and evaluation of suitable emission control strategies, supporting Regional Decision Makers in the design of long-term plans for air quality improvement. This is a complex task, due to the non-linear chemical reactions and physical processes that bring to secondary pollu...

Since 2005 an Adriatic implementation of the Regional Ocean Modeling System (AdriaROMS) is being producing operational short-term forecasts (72 hours) of some hydrodynamic properties (currents, sea level, temperature, salinity) of the Adriatic Sea at 2 km horizontal resolution and 20 vertical s-levels, on a daily basis. The main objective of AdriaR...

A new Coastal Rapid Environmental Assessment (CREA) methodology, based on an operational regional forecasting system and coastal monitoring networks of opportunity, has been developed and successfully applied to the Northern Adriatic Sea. The methodology aims at improving the initial condition estimates by combining operational coarse model fields...

In order to integrate CTM outputs with measured data, a post-processing downscaling and unbiasing procedure has been implemented: The procedure is based on a kriging algorithm with external variables, and it provides long-term evaluation of PM10, PM2.5, ozone and nitrogen dioxide at 1 km horizontal resolution. A similar downscaling and unbiasing pr...

Increased computational power in combination with the assimilation of a variety of data sources has boosted the development of operational modelling systems for coastal engineering. This paper describes three different ongoing developments and applications of operational coastal modelling systems. The first concerns the development of an operationa...

The northern Adriatic Sea (NA), the northernmost region of the Mediterranean Sea, is affected by strong anthropogenic pressure (e.g., tourism, fisheries, maritime traffic, discharge from agriculture and industry), superimposed to a large river runoff. The consequent pressure exerted on the NA ecosystem either triggers or worsens massive mucilage in...

To assess coastal storm risks this paper compares existing hazards, associated risks, coastal management plans, and civil protection schemes from nine European countries. An evaluation made of specific study sites concludes that: (a) the definition of coastal hazard or risk varies between countries, regions and sites with no pan-European agreement;...

An urban dispersion model (ADMS–Urban) was run to calculate PM10 and NO2 concentration during a one-year period, on a district of Bologna, Italy. Moreover, the exposure of 333 children was estimated using model outputs corrected with observations. The model was able to correctly simulate the long-term statistical properties of roadside observed con...

Overview of current methodologies and tools for mesoscale meteorological model validation and result evaluation, on validation datasets and user training are provided. This overview will assist in the wider aim of COST 728 to enhance European capabilities on meteorological models for air pollution dispersion applications. This report is meant as a...

This work investigates the operational building of the meteorological input for the chemical transport model (CTM) CHIMERE starting from the outputs of the limited area model LAMI. Crucial meteorological parameters were validated by analysing one-year values from LAMI and comparing them with available observations.

Bologna, as most of the urban areas located in the Po Valley, is often affected by high pollution mainly by PM10 and NO2. These pollutants are produced by large-scale chemical processes and by direct emissions inside the urban area. The urban pollution was simulated combining the background concentration calculated by a chemical transport model (CT...

The Po Valley is characterized by a large number of exceedances of air quality standards for ozone and PM10, as well as very strong air pollution episodes. To assist local authorities in air quality evaluation and management, the Emilia Romagna Environmental Agency (ARPA) has implemented an operational Air Quality forecast system, called NINFA (Nor...

CIAVOLA P., ARMAROLI C., CHIGGIATO J., VALENTINI A., DESERTI M., PERINI L. and LUCIANI P., 2007. Impact of storms along the coastline of Emilia-Romagna: the morphological signature on the Ravenna coastline (Italy). Journal of Coastal Research, SI 50 (Proceedings of the 9th International Coastal Symposium), 540 - 544. Gold Coast, Australia, ISSN 074...

The "sea state" is the description of the properties of the sea surface waves at a given time and location. This might be given in terms of wave spectrum or more simply in terms of significant wave height, wave direction, mean and peak period; this information can be obtained by means of numerical models. The sea state operational forecast system,...

To estimate exposure to NO2 and PM10 of children living in a central area of the city of Bologna, Italy. Mean personal exposure was estimated for 333 school children as weighted average of the individual hourly exposure levels during the period 1.06.2004-31.05.2005. Four microenvironments (home indoor, school indoor, traffic, home outdoor) and thre...

The specific problems of determining and simulating the surface energy balance (SEB) and the mixing height (MH) over urban areas are examined. The SEB and MH are critical components of algorithms and numerical models for the urban boundary layer, though the constituent parts of the SEB and the MH are not rou-tinely measured by national weather serv...

The urban boundary layer (UBL) exhibits many differences in comparison with the rural homogeneous boundary layer due to the larger surface roughness and increased surface heating, and by horizontal inhomogeneity of meteorological fields and the mixing height (MH) caused by strong variations in surface roughness and heating from rural to central cit...

Surface heat fluxes of the Adriatic Sea are estimated for the period 1998-2001 through bulk formulae with the goal to assess the uncertainties related to their estimations and to describe their interannual variability. In addition a comparison to observations is conducted. We computed the components of the sea surface heat budget by using two diffe...

Mucilage events (formation of very large organic aggregates and gelatinous surface layers) have been documented several times during the past two centuries in the northern Adriatic Sea (NA), while their frequency has significantly increased since 1988. In this work, meteorological and oceanographic conditions in the NA during the period June 1999-J...

A long term analysis (1865-2002) of meteorological data collected in the Po Valley and Northern Adriatic Basin have been analysed to find possible links between variability in the climatic parameters and the phenomenon of mucilage. Seasonal anomalies of temperature, calculated as spatial mean over the Po Valley area, and anomalies of North Atlantic...

Two photochemical models were applied to the area of Bologna (Italy). A simple single cell variable volume flow reactor (PBM - Photochemical Box Model) was employed to simulate the relationship between pollutant emission and ambient air quality. The model represents the Bologna area as a single cell 20 km in both length and width, with variable hei...

In the framework of the Integrated Decision Support System for air quality assessment and management operating at the Emilia-Romagna Region Meteorological Service, an appropriate meteorological input is necessary: 1) to provide meteorological information for evaluation of the pollution data observed at the urban monitoring stations; 2) as input dat...

Aim of the work is modelling the present and future scenarios of urban air quality, using an urban dispersion model. The analysed pollutants are NO2 and PM10 annual average values for present and future scenarios to compare with the law targets. Results show that the urban model performs quite well to assess long term averages of PM10 and NO2, less...