IMD launches ENFUSER to monitor air quality in Delhi

The India Meteorological Department (IMD) has operationalised an advanced high-resolution air quality early warning system for the national capital as well as a separate one for the country.

The air quality forecast model System for Integrated Modelling of Atmospheric Composition (SILAM) for the country has been further improved.

A very high-resolution city scale model ENFUSER (ENvironmental information FUsion SERvice) for Delhi has been operationalised to identify the air pollution hotspots and pollution up to the street level.

Delhi has about 40 air quality monitoring systems.

SILAM and ENFUSER have been developed in technical collaboration with the Finnish Meteorological Institute (FMI).

What are the features of SILAM?

SILAM is a global-to-meso-scale dispersion model developed for atmospheric composition, air quality, and emergency decision support applications, as well as for inverse dispersion problem solution. It also provides information on wildfire smoke. 

SILAM has been improved by implementing global emission inventories CAMS-GLOB v2.1 supplemented with EDGAR v4.3.2 for coarse and mineral-fine anthropogenic particulate matter at 10 km resolution.

The SILAM models have been extensively validated against observations over Indian region.

What are the features of ENFUSER?

ENFUSER is a novel air quality model that combines dispersion modelling techniques, information fusion algorithms and statistical approaches. The operational modelling system provides both real-time and forecasted, high resolution information on the urban air quality.

The speciality of the ENFUSER is the high utilisation of measurement data such as air quality observations, a detailed description of the road network, buildings, land-use information, high resolution satellite images, ground elevation and population data. 

The ENFUSER natively taps into the operative IMD’s regional SILAM access point. Its results are evaluated with the satellite measurements and observations, and the model is found to capture the hotspots over Delhi very well.

Air Quality forecast model WRF-Chem has also been updated with high-resolution land use and land cover information to improve the air quality forecast. Now AQ early warning system also provides air quality forecast for Lucknow, Kanpur and Varanasi at 2 km resolution. The AQ forecast is also available for some other cities at 10 km resolution.

Manorama Yearbook app is now available on Google Play Store and iOS App Store