The city of Rome is characterized by high ozone, NO2 and PM10 levels claiming for the implementation of emission
control strategies to improve the air quality and to decrease the risks of health effects on inhabitants. In this perspective an
atmospheric modelling system based on the chemical transport model FARM has been applied for the year 2005 over a nested
domain including the metropolitan area. To improve the description of local scale atmospheric circulation characteristics,
observational meteorological data are analysed using the Isentropic Analysis package (ISAN). Since urban traffic emissions
represent a relevant source of pollutants, hourly emissions coming from this sector have been estimated by means of a traffic
assignment model, based on a source-destination approach, coupled with an emission model based on COPERT-3 methodology.
The emissions from the other sectors have been derived from the national inventory and then disaggregated at the municipal level.
The analysis of model results for the year 2005 against experimental data reveals a good agreement suggesting the use of the
modelling system to study the impact on the air quality of different emission control strategies at both regional and urban scales.
The 2010 has been considered as the future year base case scenario and the traffic limitation within the Rome urban core has been
considered as an emission control action. The impact of this emission scenario has been then analysed by means of a semi-empiric
approach: a significant decrease of PM10 and NO2 yearly average concentrations is expected to occur at urban traffic stations while
the minimum reduction is expected at urban background and rural stations