scenarios. When addressing the “fitness-for-purpose” of AERIS, it should be noted that it has been created under a policy-driven framework and by no means should be considered as a substitute of the ordinary AQMS. To this respect, the clear advantages it has in software requirements, configuration and running practices as well as CPU-time should be contrasted against the saliency and credi- bility of the estimates it produces. Moreover, an effort in reconciling the complexity of modelling with the conciseness of policies was made, which is reflected the conceptual and computational struc- tures of AERIS. It can be anticipated that the results provided by this IAM will help to gain further insight on the general situation of air quality in Spain and Europe as advanced by the validation practices addressed on this paper. Additionally, it should be reminded that AERIS is an IAM currently under development to include the quantification of impacts to ecosystems, human health and control costs. Improvements on issues such as the consideration of con- stant speciation profiles or a single-year meteorology will be un- dertaken as part of the usual model evaluation framework.
Acknowledgements
The CMAQ modelling system was made available by the USEPA and it is supported by the Community Modelling and Analysis System (CMAS) Center. Emission datasets and monitoring data from EMEP, the Spanish and Portuguese Ministries of the Envi- ronment were used. Michel Vedrenne acknowledges support from UPM and CONACyT (Mexico).