Author(s)

Roberto San José¹, Juan L. Pérez¹, Libia Pérez¹, Rosa M. González², Julia Pecci³, Antonio Garzón³, Marino Palacios³

¹Environmental Software and Modelling Group, Computer Science School, Technical University of Madrid (UPM), Madrid, Spain.
²Department of Meteorology and Geophysics, Faculty of Physics, Complutense University of Madrid (UCM), Ciudad Universitaria, Madrid, Spain.
³Indra S.A., C/Mar Egeo, 4, Pol. Industrial 1, Madrid, Spain.

The objective of this publication is to present a modeling system that allows investigating the possible climate change-driven effects of air pollutants on human health. The system connects global climate change to ambient air pollution concentrations that then are linked to epidemiological endpoints. The tool has been applied to quantify the future (2030, 2050 and 2100) impact on air pollution and health of two of the IPCC global climate scenarios over the cities: Madrid, Milan and London (zone Kensington-Chelsea) with different very high spatial resolutions (100, 200 and 10 meters) respect to the present (2011). Results indicate how ambient air pollutant concentrations respond to different climatic conditions, and how human health could be affected by changes in air pollution induced by global warning. The system includes global climate simulations, nested with regional/urban meteorological models (prognostic and diagnostic) to drive chemical transport models (offline and online modes) and a computational fluid dynamic model keeping anthropogenic emissions and the urban landscape at reference level (2011) to isolate the effects of the global climate over the city. The results of these simulations suggest that climate will have an important effect on urban air pollution and health over the next several decades, especially under the IPCC RCP 8.5 scenario.

Climate, Dowscaling, WRF/Chem, Health

José, R. , Pérez, J. , Pérez, L. , González, R. , Pecci, J. , Garzón, A. and Palacios, M. (2016) Impacts on the Urban Air Quality and Health of Global Climate Scenarios Using Different Dynamical Downscaling Approaches. Journal of Geoscience and Environment Protection, 4, 168-174. doi: 10.4236/gep.2016.44020.