Simulating air quality management policies in Europe with the SHERPA-Cloud model

This presentation deals with the SHERPA-Cloud online simplified air quality model. Based on a previous version of the offline SHERPA model, this new online model can be used a) to simulate the impact of emission reduction scenarios on air quality, and b) to understand the main (sectoral and geographical) sources impacting air pollution for a given EU region or city.

From a methodological point of view, the model implements a set of SRR - source-receptor relationships (meta-model of the EMEP Chemistry Transport Model) and it is able to simulate the impact of an air policy in few seconds, with a good level of accuracy.

From the IT infrastructure and technologies points of view, the SHERPA-Cloud is based on an on-premise cloud system called BDAP (Big Data Analytics Platform) which provides a JupyterLab service and the tools to create dashboards from Jupyter notebooks using the Voilà plugin.

Thanks to its simple and easy-to-use interface, SHERPA-Cloud allows for various types of users, policy makers, citizens, NGOs and industries, to quickly test how air quality can changes when implementing new emission reduction strategies, and to focus efforts to the most efficient actions to improve air quality, in terms of geographical and sectoral policies. SHERPA-Cloud can also be used to support cities when dealing with the ‘Covenant of Mayor’ or the ‘Climate Neutral Cities’ initiatives, to evaluate the side-effects on air quality of climate mitigation measures.

The SHERPA-Cloud web application is available at this link: https://jeodpp.jrc.ec.europa.eu/eu/dashboard/voila/render/SHERPA/Sherpa.ipynb. The access to the application requires first a EUlogin account, the European Commission’s user authentication service.