EPIS: a comprehensive modelling system to support air pollution policy making

摘要

Information plays a crucial role in environmental policy making. In the field of air pollution policy makers require information on emissions and on the resulting air quality both at present and as a consequence of possible future developments. These data and the methods and models to be used are rather complicated and the expertise needed is not fully available within all levels of government. A comprehensive modelling system was developed to provide policy makers with such data and support them with tools to present the data, to modify them by scenario type manipulations and to feed the resulting emission data into models to calculate air quality. This paper describes such a tool, implemented at the provincial level in the Netherlands, using the national Emission Inventory. National and international versions of the system are now under development using the European scale emission inventory of CORINAIR90.