Forecasting ozone daily maximum levels at Santiago, Chile

In major urban areas, air pollution impact on health is serious enough to include it in the group of meteorological variables that are forecast daily. This work focusses on the comparison of different forecasting systems for daily maximum ozone levels at Santiago, Chile. The modelling tools used for these systems were linear time series, artificial neural networks and fuzzy models. The structure of the forecasting model was derived from basic principles and it includes a combination of persistence and daily maximum air temperature as input variables. Assessment of the models is based on two indices: their ability to forecast well an episode, and their tendency to forecast an episode that did not occur at the end (a false positive). All the models tried in this work showed good forecasting performance, with 70–95% of successful forecasts at two monitor sites: Downtown (moderate impacts) and Eastern (downwind, highest impacts). The number of false positives was not negligible, but this may be improved by expressing the forecast in broad classes: low, average, high, very high impacts; the fuzzy model was the most reliable forecast, with the lowest number of false positives among the different models evaluated. The quality of the results and the dynamics of ozone formation suggest the use of a forecast to warn people about excessive exposure during episodic days at Santiago.