This review provides a community's perspective on air quality research focusing mainly on developments over the past decade. The article provides perspectives on current and future challenges as well as research needs for selected key topics. While this paper is not an exhaustive review of all research areas in the field of air quality, we have selected key topics that we feel are important from air quality research and policy perspectives. After providing a short historical overview, this review focuses on improvements in characterizing sources and emissions of air pollution, new air quality observations and instrumentation, advances in air quality prediction and forecasting, understanding interactions of air quality with meteorology and climate, exposure and health assessment, and air quality management and policy. In conducting the review, specific objectives were (i) to address current developments that push the boundaries of air quality research forward, (ii) to highlight the emerging prominent gaps of knowledge in air quality research, and (iii) to make recommendations to guide the direction for future research within the wider community. This review also identifies areas of particular importance for air quality policy. The original concept of this review was borne at the International Conference on Air Quality 2020 (held online due to the COVID 19 restrictions during 18–26 May 2020), but the article incorporates a wider landscape of research literature within the field of air quality science. On air pollution emissions the review highlights, in particular, the need to reduce uncertainties in emissions from diffuse sources, particulate matter chemical components, shipping emissions, and the importance of considering both indoor and outdoor sources. There is a growing need to have integrated air pollution and related observations from both ground-based and remote sensing instruments, including in particular those on satellites. The research should also capitalize on the growing area of low-cost sensors, while ensuring a quality of the measurements which are regulated by guidelines. Connecting various physical scales in air quality modelling is still a continual issue, with cities being affected by air pollution gradients at local scales and by long-range transport. At the same time, one should allow for the impacts from climate change on a longer timescale. Earth system modelling offers considerable potential by providing a consistent framework for treating scales and processes, especially where there are significant feedbacks, such as those related to aerosols, chemistry, and meteorology. Assessment of exposure to air pollution should consider the impacts of both indoor and outdoor emissions, as well as application of more sophisticated, dynamic modelling approaches to predict concentrations of air pollutants in both environments. With particulate matter being one of the most important pollutants for health, research is indicating the urgent need to understand, in particular, the role of particle number and chemical components in terms of health impact, which in turn requires improved emission inventories and models for predicting high-resolution distributions of these metrics over cities. The review also examines how air pollution management needs to adapt to the above-mentioned new challenges and briefly considers the implications from the COVID-19 pandemic for air quality. Finally, we provide recommendations for air quality research and support for policy.

In recent years, the PALM 6.0 modelling system has been rapidly developing its capability to simulate physical processes within urban environments. Some examples in this regard are energy-balance solvers for building and land surfaces, a radiative transfer model to account for multiple reflections and shading, a plant-canopy model to consider the effects of plants on flow (thermo)dynamics, and a chemistry transport model to enable simulation of air quality. This study provides a thorough evaluation of modelled meteorological, air chemistry, and ground and wall-surface quantities against dedicated in situ measurements taken in an urban environment in Dejvice, Prague, the Czech Republic. Measurements included monitoring of air quality and meteorology in street canyons, surface temperature scanning with infrared cameras, and monitoring of wall heat fluxes. Large-eddy simulations (LES) using the PALM model driven by boundary conditions obtained from a mesoscale model were performed for multiple days within two summer and three winter episodes characterized by different atmospheric conditions. For the simulated episodes, the resulting temperature, wind speed, and chemical compound concentrations within street canyons show a realistic representation of the observed state, except that the LES did not adequately capture night-time cooling near the surface for certain meteorological conditions. In some situations, insufficient turbulent mixing was modelled, resulting in higher near-surface concentrations. At most of the evaluation points, the simulated surface temperature reproduces the observed surface temperature reasonably well for both absolute and daily amplitude values. However, especially for the winter episodes and for modern buildings with multilayer walls, the heat transfer through walls is not well captured in some cases, leading to discrepancies between the modelled and observed wall-surface temperature. Furthermore, the study corroborates model dependency on the accuracy of the input data. In particular, the temperatures of surfaces affected by nearby trees strongly depend on the spatial distribution of the leaf area density, land surface temperatures at grass surfaces strongly depend on the initial soil moisture, wall-surface temperatures depend on the correct setting of wall material parameters, and concentrations depend on detailed information on spatial distribution of emissions, all of which are often unavailable at sufficient accuracy. The study also points out some current model limitations, particularly the implications of representing topography and complex heterogeneous facades on a discrete Cartesian grid, and glass facades that are not fully represented in terms of radiative processes. Our findings are able to validate the representation of physical processes in PALM while also pointing out specific shortcomings. This will help to build a baseline for future developments of the model and improvements of simulations of physical processes in an urban environment.

Cities are characterized by different physical properties of surface compared to their rural counterparts, resulting in a specific regime of the meteorological phenomenon. Our study aims to evaluate the impact of typical urban surfaces on the central European urban climate in several model simulations, performed with the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model and Regional Climate Model (RegCM). The specific processes occurring in the typical urban environment are described in the models by various types of urban parameterizations, greatly differing in complexity. Our results show that all models and urban parameterizations are able to reproduce the most typical urban effect, the summer evening and nocturnal urban heat island, with the average magnitude of 2–3 °C. The impact of cities on the wind is clearly dependent on the urban parameterization employed, with more simple ones unable to fully capture the wind speed reduction induced by the city. In the summer, a significant difference in the boundary-layer height (about 25 %) between models is detected. The urban-induced changes of temperature and wind speed are propagated into higher altitudes up to 2 km, with a decreasing tendency of their magnitudes. With the exception of the daytime in the summer, the urban environment improves the weather conditions a little with regard to the pollutant dispersion, which could lead to the partly decreased concentration of the primary pollutants.

It is well known that the urban canopy (UC) layer, i.e., the layer of air corresponding to the assemblage of the buildings, roads, park, trees and other objects typical to cities, is characterized by specific meteorological conditions at city scales generally differing from those over rural surroundings. We refer to the forcing that acts on the meteorological variables over urbanized areas as the urban canopy meteorological forcing (UCMF). UCMF has multiple aspects, while one of the most studied is the generation of the urban heat island (UHI) as an excess of heat due to increased absorption and trapping of radiation in street canyons. However, enhanced drag plays important role too, reducing mean wind speeds and increasing vertical eddy mixing of pollutants. As air quality is strongly tied to meteorological conditions, the UCMF leads to modifications of air chemistry and transport of pollutants. Although it has been recognized in the last decade that the enhanced vertical mixing has a dominant role in the impact of the UCMF on air quality, very little is known about the uncertainty of vertical eddy diffusion arising from different representation in numerical models and how this uncertainty propagates to the final species concentrations as well as to the changes due to the UCMF. To bridge this knowledge gap, we set up the Regional Climate Model version 4 (RegCM4) coupled to the Comprehensive Air Quality Model with Extensions (CAMx) chemistry transport model over central Europe and designed a series of simulations to study how UC affects the vertical turbulent transport of selected pollutants through modifications of the vertical eddy diffusion coefficient (K_v) using six different methods for K_v calculation. The mean concentrations of ozone and PM_2.5 in selected city canopies are analyzed. These are secondary pollutants or having secondary components, upon which turbulence acts in a much more complicated way than in the case of primary pollutants by influencing their concentrations not only directly but indirectly via precursors too. Calculations are performed over cascading domains (of 27, 9, and 3 km horizontal resolutions), which further enables to analyze the sensitivity of the numerical model to grid resolution. A number of model simulations are carried out where either urban canopies are considered or replaced by rural ones in order to isolate the UC meteorological forcing. Apart from the well-pronounced and expected impact on temperature (increases up to 2 ^∘C) and wind (decreases by up to 2 ms⁻¹), there is a strong impact on vertical eddy diffusion in all of the six K_v methods. The K_v enhancement ranges from less than 1 up to 30 m² s⁻¹ at the surface and from 1 to 100 m² s⁻¹ at higher levels depending on the methods. The largest impact is obtained for the turbulent kinetic energy (TKE)-based methods. The range of impact on the vertical eddy diffusion coefficient propagates to a range of ozone (O₃) increase of 0.4 to 4 ppbv in both summer and winter (5 %–10 % relative change). In the case of PM_2.5, we obtained decreases of up to 1 µg m⁻³ in summer and up to 2 µg m⁻³ in winter (up to 30 %–40 % relative change). Comparing these results to the “total-impact”, i.e., to the impact of all meteorological modifications due to UCMF, we can conclude that much of UCMF is explained by the enhanced vertical eddy diffusion, which counterbalances the opposing effects of other components of this forcing (temperature, humidity and wind). The results further show that this conclusion holds regardless of the resolution chosen and in both the warm and cold parts of the year.

Cities and urban areas are well-known for their impact on meteorological variables and thereby modification of the local climate. Our study aims to generalize the urban-induced changes in specific meteorological variables by introducing a single phenomenon – the urban meteorology island (UMI). A wide ensemble of 24 model simulations with the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) regional climate model and the Regional Climate Model (RegCM) on a European domain with 9 km horizontal resolution were performed to investigate various urban-induced modifications as individual components of the UMI. The results show that such an approach is meaningful, because in nearly all meteorological variables considered, statistically significant changes occur in cities. Besides previously documented urban-induced changes in temperature, wind speed and boundary-layer height, the study is also focused on changes in cloud cover, precipitation and humidity. An increase in cloud cover in cities, together with a higher amount of sub-grid-scale precipitation, is detected on summer afternoons. Specific humidity is significantly lower in cities. Further, the study shows that different models and parameterizations can have a strong impact on discussed components of the UMI. Multi-layer urban schemes with anthropogenic heat considered increase winter temperatures by more than 2 ^∘C and reduce wind speed more strongly than other urban models. The selection of the planetary-boundary-layer scheme also influences the urban wind speed reduction, as well as the boundary-layer height, to the greatest extent. Finally, urban changes in cloud cover and precipitation are mostly sensitive to the parameterization of convection.

This paper deals with the urban land-surface impact (i.e., the urban canopy meteorological forcing; UCMF) on extreme air pollution for selected central European cities for present-day climate conditions (2015–2016) using three regional climate-chemistry models: the regional climate models RegCM and WRF-Chem (its meteorological part), the chemistry transport model CAMx coupled to either RegCM and WRF and the “chemical” component of WRF-Chem. Most of the studies dealing with the urban canopy meteorological forcing on air pollution focused on change in average conditions or only on a selected winter and/or summer air pollution episode. Here we extend these studies by focusing on long-term extreme air pollution levels by looking at not only the change in average values, but also their high (and low) percentile values, and we combine the analysis with investigating selected high-pollution episodes too. As extreme air pollution is often linked to extreme values of meteorological variables (e.g., low planetary boundary layer height, low winds, high temperatures), the urbanization-induced extreme meteorological modifications will be analyzed too. The validation of model results show reasonable model performance for regional-scale temperature and precipitation. Ozone is overestimated by about 10–20 µg m⁻³ (50 %–100 %); on the other hand, extreme summertime ozone values are underestimated by all models. Modeled nitrogen dioxide (NO₂) concentrations are well correlated with observations, but results are marked by a systematic underestimation up to 20 µg m⁻³ (−50 %). PM_2.5 (particles with diameter ≤2.5 µm) are systematically underestimated in most of the models by around 5 µg m⁻³ (50 %–70 %). Our results show that the impact on extreme values of meteorological variables can be substantially different from that of the impact on average ones: low (5th percentile) temperature in winter responds to UCMF much more than average values, while in summer, 95th percentiles increase more than averages. The impact on boundary layer height (PBLH), i.e., its increase is stronger for thicker PBLs and wind speed, is reduced much more for strong winds compared to average ones. The modeled changes in ozone (O₃), NO₂ and PM_2.5 show the expected pattern, i.e., increase in average 8 h O₃ up to 2–3 ppbv, decrease in daily average NO₂ by around 2–4 ppbv and decrease in daily average PM_2.5 by around −2 µg m⁻³. Regarding the impact on extreme (95th percentile) values of these pollutants, the impact on ozone at the high end of the distribution is rather similar to the impact on average 8 h values. A different picture is obtained however for extreme values of NO₂ and PM_2.5. The impact on the 95th percentile values is almost 2 times larger than the impact on the daily averages for both pollutants. The simulated impact on extreme values further well corresponds to the UCMF impact simulated for the selected high-pollution episodes. Our results bring light to the principal question: whether extreme air quality is modified by urban land surface with a different magnitude compared to the impact on average air pollution. We showed that this is indeed true for NO₂ and PM_2.5, while in the case of ozone, our results did not show substantial differences between the impact on mean and extreme values.