The recent air quality directive (2008/50/EC) encourages the introduction of modelling as a necessary tool for air quality assessment and management. Towards this aim, an air quality management system (AQMS) has been developed and installed in the Department of Labour Inspection (DLI) of the Republic of Cyprus. The AQMS comprises of two operational modules, providing hourly nowcasting and daily forecasting of the air quality status, implemented as an integrated model system that performs nested grid meteorological and photochemical simulations. A third operational module provides the capability of an interactive configuration of custom emission scenarios and corresponding model runs covering user-defined domains of interest. Statistical indicators are calculated at the end of each day for the measurement locations of DLI's air quality monitoring network. Besides, the system provides an advanced user interface, which is realised as a web-based application providing access to model results from any computer with an internet connection and a web browser.

Estimating the parameters of an unidentified toxic pollutant source is crucial for public safety, especially in densely populated urban areas. Implementing source term estimation methods in real-world urban environments is challenging due to complex phenomena and the absence of concentration observational data. This work combines a computational fluid dynamics numerical simulation with the Metropolis–Hastings MCMC algorithm to identify the location and quantify the release rate of an unknown source within the geometry of Augsburg city center. To address the lack of concentration measurements, synthetic observations are generated by a forward dispersion model. The methodology is tested using these datasets, both as directly calculated by the forward model and with added Gaussian noise under different source release and wind flow scenarios. The results indicate that in most cases, both the source location and the release rate are estimated accurately. Although a higher performance is achieved using synthetic datasets without additional noise, high accuracy predictions are also obtained in many applications of noisy measurement datasets. In general, the outcomes demonstrate that the presented methodology can be a useful tool for estimating unknown source parameters in real-world urban applications.

The assessment of seawater quality in coastal areas is an important issue as it is related to the welfare of coastal ecosystems, a prerequisite for the provision of the related ecosystem services. During the last decades, marine eutrophication has become an important problem in coastal waters as a result of nutrient inputs increase. Consequently, there is need for appropriate methods and tools to assess the eutrophication status of seawater which should be user-friendly to coastal managers and support the adoption of effective plans for the protection and sustainable development of the coastal environment. In this framework, a user-friendly webGIS application has been developed and the Strait of Mytilene at the southeastern part of the Island of Lesvos in the NE Aegean Sea, Greece, was used as a case study. The methodology includes, as a first step, the evaluation of the accuracy of spatial interpolators widely applied in oceanographic studies for assessing the spatial distribution of relevant variables. The most appropriate interpolator revealed for each variable is subsequently applied for the production of the representative thematic layer. The second step involves the integration of the information from the optimal thematic layers representing the spatial distributions of the variables under study; as a result, a new thematic layer illustrating the eutrophication status of the study area is produced. The webGIS application is fully available via a web browser and provides a number of geoprocessing modules developed in Python which implement the user interface, the application of the interpolation analytical tasks, the statistical evaluation toolset and the integration of the optimal interpolated layers. Suggestions for further improvement of the proposed webGIS application are discussed.