Development and implementation of an integrated system for the assessment of air quality and for the management of the interventions provided by the Regulatory Plan of the Port of Livorno.

Between October 2017 and 2018, Arianet®, Arpa Toscana and Ibimet (CNR Institute for Biometereology) launched a project dedicated to meteorological, emission and air quality modeling.

The study area extends for 40 km and includes the port of Livorno and the entire municipal area, the coastal strip that extends from Rosignano Solvay to Marina di Pisa and the northern hinterland up to Pisa.

The choice of this domain made it possible to analyze the areas potentially affected by port activities and to include the emission sources located in the surrounding areas in the model simulations.

The modeling system was applied to reconstruct the overall concentrations of pollutants over an entire year, from March 2017 to February 2018, and cover the spectrum of emissive and meteorological conditions over different seasons. 

The simulated concentrations were compared with the values measured by ARPAT stations, part of the official regional air quality monitoring network, over the same period of time. 

In order to expand the information provided by fixed stations, CNR-IBIMET conducted – in coordination with ARPA Toscana – an air quality monitoring campaign in the city of Livorno, deploying 6 low-cost air quality stations (AirQino ) and a mobile laboratory (AirQLab). 

At the same time, ARPAT carried out a monitoring campaign using a mobile laboratory, positioned in proximity of two AirQino stations. 

The correspondence between the measurement sites over a series of periods made it possible to calibrate the measurements of low-cost stations and to broaden the basis of comparison for the model.

The joint detection of NO2, PM2.5, PM10, SO2, O3 showed how the modeling system as a whole is able to reproduce the average levels and the variability of the concentrations of primary and secondary pollutants over the different areas analyzed.  

The system, consisting of a configured and validated modeling software and a database with hourly observations, was installed on a high-performance computing server at the Port Authority of Livorno.