In this talk I will present the models we are currently developing and applying: SHERPA and SHERPA-city.

SHERPA addresses “urban background” concentrations (spatial resolution of 7x7km, over the whole Europe), and it is a “surrogate model” of a fully-fledged Physically Based Model. Its main aim is to reproduce (in a quick / interactive way) the link between emissions (of air quality precursors) and concentrations (of NO2, PM2.5, PM10 yearly values) to evaluate the impact of emission reduction policies. In addition to this, SHERPA performs also other tasks, as: a) “source allocation” (to derive the main sectoral and geographical sources of pollution for different urban areas) and b) “governance” (to derive how to coordinate with surrounding regions if local actions are not sufficient to improve air quality).

SHERPA-city on the contrary works at city level (spatial resolution of 20x20m, over the whole Europe), but mainly for primary pollutants. Its main objective is to test the impact of traffic measures (low emission zones, congestion charges…) on air quality at city scale. It works with default data for any local domain in the EU, and it is based on a surrogate (“kernel” approach) of a Gaussian model, run on different domains to describe various meteorological and orographic patterns.

After the methodological presentations of the two models, an application of SHERPA will be shown, focusing on the application performed to produce the report “Urban PM2.5 Atlas: air quality in cities”. This report (presented during a high level conference in Paris, in November 2017) has shown the main causes of pollution for the 150 biggest EU cities, showing geographical and sectoral sources to be addressed (for each city) to improve air quality.

Finally, the future ideas for the development of the tools will be shown, to foster possible cooperation.

Both models (SHERPA and SHERPA-city) are freely available. SHERPA is already online at http://aqm.jrc.ec.europa.eu/sherpa.aspx while SHERPA-city is going to be finalized and released soon.

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This seminar has been jointly organized by FEEM and IEFE, Bocconi University.