The MINNI Project: An Integrated Assessment Modeling System For Policy Making

In 2002, the Italian Ministry of the Environment decided to sponsor the project presented by ENEA for the development of the national Integrated Assessment Modeling system (the MINNI Project). The objective of the project is to support the policy makers in the elaboration and assessment of air pollution policies at international, national and local level, by means of the more recent understandings of atmospheric processes. The MINNI Project consists of two main components (Figure 1). A multi pollutant eulerian Atmospheric Modeling System (AMS) simulating air pollution dynamics and multiphase chemical transformations, providing hourly concentrations and annual depositions of SO2, NOx, NH3, PM10, PM2.5 and O-3, with a spatial resolution ranging between 400 and 4 km(2). AMS provides RAINS Italy with the Atmospheric Transfer Matrices (ATM) or "area to grid" transfer matrices. [GRAPHICS] The RAINS-Italy Integrated Assessment Model, developed within a joint research project ENEA-IIASA, inheriting all the features of the RAINS-Europe model, but comprising the atmospheric transport and chemical transformations, as calculated by AMS, in the ATM. Rains-Italy provides emission scenarios for the mentioned pollutants (plus VOC), as well as estimations of costs associated with the implementation of the abatement technologies and impact assessment. The two components complement each other, offering a powerful tool which allows to provide the policy makers with detailed analyses, where requested, tailored on the specific national or local needs. AMS may feed RAINS-Italy with fine resolution ATMs and/or different meteorological year based ATMs. RAINS-Italy may feed AMS with a projected emission vector, regarding future scenarios, to develop expected detailed deposition/concentration maps. Eloquent examples are given, about the flexibility and the potential applications of the whole system as scientific underpinning support to the policy makers.