Dai, Yuqing, Qian, Juncheng, Zhong, Jian ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1026-8695, Cai, Xiaoming and MacKenzie, A. Rob (2026) Recent progress, bottlenecks, and outlook of multiscale air quality modelling: a review. Atmospheric Environment: X, 29:100435. ISSN 2590‑1621 (Online) (doi:10.1016/j.aeaoa.2026.100435)

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Abstract

Air pollution spans metre-scale near-road hotspots to regional and intercontinental transport, yet no single model can represent the full range of processes that control exposure to different pollutants. This review synthesises recent developments in regional-to-local coupling, covering scale-aware regional chemical transport models (CTMs), local dispersion and street-network models and computational fluid dynamics (CFD, from practical RANS to chemistry-enabled LES and emerging GPU/LBM acceleration), and machine learning (ML), including mass-consistent super-resolution, for downscaling and surrogates. One-way “offline” coupling remains the most widely used approach because it is modular and computationally efficient, but its performance depends on how CTM background fields are defined and mapped and on how emission overlap, temporal mismatch and reduced chemistry are handled. Two-way “online” approaches, including Plume-in-Grid (PinG) for point sources and Street-in-Grid (SinG) for dense urban networks, exchange mass during integration, allowing urban plumes, NO–O3 titration and aerosol–radiation interactions to feedback on regional oxidant budgets and meteorology. These benefits require conservative remapping, turbulence and mixing consistency at the canopy–boundary layer interface, and transparent mapping between chemical mechanisms across scales. Persistent challenges include interface turbulence–chemistry interactions, harmonisation of emissions and meteorological inputs, treatment of urban green infrastructure without double counting drag or deposition, computational feasibility for chemistry/aerosol-coupled CFD, ML transferability under regime shifts, and propagation of input uncertainty. Priority directions include regime-based criteria for when two-way coupling is required, routine mass-budget diagnostics, adaptive or variable-resolution strategies, and ML downscales and surrogates that enforce non-negativity and mass consistency for scenario testing.

Item Type:	Article
Uncontrolled Keywords:	dispersion model, multiscale modelling, air quality models, model coupling
Subjects:	G Geography. Anthropology. Recreation > GE Environmental Sciences Q Science > Q Science (General) Q Science > QA Mathematics > QA75 Electronic computers. Computer science
Faculty / School / Research Centre / Research Group:	Faculty of Engineering & Science Faculty of Engineering & Science > School of Computing & Mathematical Sciences (CMS)
Last Modified:	30 Mar 2026 11:42
URI:	https://gala.gre.ac.uk/id/eprint/52781

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