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 real- istic, 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 repro- duction 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 corre- spondence 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.
The main reason that motivated the creation of this model was to produce a reliable yet simple screening tool that would provide decision and policy making support for different “what-if