5. Conclusions
The construction of AERIS as an IAM intended to evaluate the
effect of policies directed to tackle the air pollution problem is an
improvement in the current availability of modelling resources for
stakeholders in Spain. The parameterization of a fully contrasted
and operative AQMS (WRF-SMOKE-CMAQ) proved to be consistent
enough to make the results yielded by AERIS reasonable and realistic,
according to the results presented in this paper. In general
terms considering a scale finer than the European-level (i.e. GAINS)
for the description of the Iberian Peninsula allowed us to obtain
outputs with a higher detail degree. A reasonable level of reproduction
of the outputs yielded by the AQMS has been witnessed,
showing a slight tendency for overprediction but always within
good-performance ranges defined in scientific literature. In a
similar line, AERIS presented a moderate level of statistic correspondence
with air quality observations from representative
monitoring locations. These analyses revealed that the limitations
of AERIS lie precisely on the fact that it constitutes a general
parameterization of an AQMS and its ancillary data, which are very
likely to change as emission scenarios are changed with respect of
the considered baseline scenario. As a consequence, stakeholders
should be fully aware about the limitations associated with AERIS
when destined to policy-support activities