D E S C R I P T I O N O F W O R K - MEGAPOLI - Dmi

MEGAPOLI 212520
understood. However, a complete quantitative picture of these interactions is clearly missing.
Understanding and quantifying these missing links will be the focus of MEGAPOLI.
Figure 1: Worldwide megacities (Source UN, 2002).
B.1.3 Science and Technology methodology and associated work plan
The MEGAPOLI project will be realised by 23 partners, representatives of leading research
organizations in atmospheric pollution, meteorological and climate research, and organizations
responsible for the urban air quality and population exposure forecast and control from 11 European
countries. This breadth guarantees that the project can accomplish its ambitious objectives and
tasks, ranging from the collection and analysis of state-of-the-art measurements to the continued
development and application of complex numerical models to the distribution of results in a form
directly usable by the end users and understandable by the public. The project also requires a very
strong management and co-ordination due to its broad scientific basis. This will be accomplished
through well-defined workpackages and its “management problem-solving approach”.
Realisation of the objectives of the project as well as answering the key scientific questions (see
Sect. 1.2) will be accomplished via nine separate but inter-linked Work Packages (WPs), which are
shown schematically in Figure 3. The WPs are described below, first in terms of an overview of the
workpackage concept and of the megacities in focus, and then in a more detailed description of the
state-of-the-art and our plans to advance beyond this for each WP.
B.1.3.1 Overall strategy and general description
The first critical step in improving our understanding of how megacities impact air quality,
atmospheric composition and climate on different scales is the development of high-quality
inventories of the emissions of relevant gases and aerosols and their precursors, and determining
how these are anticipated to change in the mid-term future, as well as how these change under
various scenarios (e.g, movement of 10% of the population out of a megacity and into the
surrounding countryside). This will form the key input to the remaining components of the study,
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