Air quality modelling and mobile app development for Sarajevo

King’s College London has been funded by the United Nations Environment Programme to combine air pollution model data with a mobile app, freely available for the city population, to raise awareness of the poor quality of the air in the city.

King’s College London has developed a coupled regional and local scale air pollution modelling system for health impact assessment and policy applications (CMAQ-urban). The modeling system has advanced the traditional standalone regional/local scale models with an ability to capture long-range transport pollutants such as O₃ and PM_10/2.5 using the Community Multiscale Air Quality Modelling system (CMAQ), as well as for locally generated pollutants at roadside locations, using the ADMS-Roads model. The system is capable of predicting hourly air pollutant concentrations every 20m across large areas and has been used to predict concentrations of NO_X, NO₂, O₃, PM₁₀ and PM_2.5 and the model performance benchmarked against ground based measurements.

As the final component of this project, a free Sarajevan mobile phone app has been created, which takes trip locations from A to B, anywhere in the city, and provides three alternative routes, ranking them according to the exposure to air pollution on each.

Name	Expertise	Role in the project
Dr Nutthida Kitwiroon	Air pollution modelling	Predicting air pollution in Sarajevo
Dr Andrew Grieve	Mobile apps	Develop human exposure app
Dr Sean Beevers	Air pollution modelling	Work package lead