HARMONIE-AROME high-resolution experiments in the Destination Earth On-demand Extremes digital twin: an air quality models and end users perspective

In the framework of the flagship EU Destination Earth initiative, the On-Demand Extremes digital twin project aims at delivering an event- and user-driven weather-induced engine for selected impact sectors. The core of the project lies in the design and development of an operational capability for an on-demand workflow on Europe's fastest supercomputers, efficiently exploiting large data volumes coming from observations and hectometric limited-area numerical weather prediction (NWP) simulations for the benefit of a variety of users. Within the project, air quality (AQ) is one of the chosen impact sectors to highlight the DT engine capabilities.

Poor air quality is a major cause of premature death and disease, and the single largest environmental health risk in Europe. AQ models are routinely run at meteorological and environmental agencies to identify contributions to air quality problems and assist in the design of effective strategies to reduce harmful air pollutants.

The talk will showcase the work done during the first phase of the project in the design and development of high-resolution HARMONIE-AROME NWP experiments within the Extremes DT infrastructure Prototype whose output is given as input for AQ model runs. Initially focusing on a historical summer heatwave case, the presentation will highlight the impact of higher resolution and other configuration parameters as well as the steps taken to deliver the NWP output variables to the AQ model developers on the target high-performance computing facilities.

Example use cases for air quality end users will be shown and next steps will be discussed in the context of the second phase of the project, which aims at delivering an integrated end-to-end, on-demand NWP-AQ workflow.