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  • Page | Last updated: 07 Nov 2025
Quality control indicators for AQ forecasts (Work Group 3)

This working group aims at providing a specific benchmarking framework for modelled air quality forecasts. Performance indicators have been developed to provide additional information about the capability of the forecasting system to detect and anticipate regulatory threshold exceedances and to check its ability to provide accurate forecasts (benchmarked against the ‘persistence model’).

FAIRMODE

Guidance

Leaders: Pawel Durka (IEP), Alexandra Monteiro (Univ. Aveiro)

FAIRMODE guidance document on modelling quality objectives and benchmarking - Version 3.3

The development of the procedure for air quality model benchmarking in the context of the Air Quality Directive 2008/50/EC (AQD) has been an on-going activity in the context of the FAIRMODE community. A central...

Description

This working group aims at providing a specific benchmarking framework for modelled air quality forecasts. Performance indicators have been developed to provide additional information about the capability of the forecasting system to detect and anticipate regulatory threshold exceedances and to check its ability to provide accurate forecasts (benchmarked against the ‘persistence model’). Future activities will focus on:

  1. Assessing the clarity of the output of the forecast evaluation and discussing a possible tiered approach
  2. Developing the AQI plots (multi-category contingency table, …) in view of improving the communication of results to non-experts
  3. Documenting the procedure for experts (slideshow, video, training sessions)
  4. Developing an open and user-friendly software platform
  5. Further testing of the indicators

Publications

Tools and datasets

Delta Tool

The Delta Tool software is an IDL-based model evaluation tool developed within the framework of FAIRMODE for benchmarking Ambient Air Quality Directive (AAQD) modelling applications.

WG3 Meetings