Context

Project Funding

This Project (PPR/2015/7) entitled: “Etude de l’impact des rejets atmosphériques des centrales thermiques sur la qualité de l’air dans un cadre de Développement Durable”, is funded by the Ministry of National Education, Vocational Training, Higher Education and Scientific Research, and the National Centre for Scientific and Technical Research, in Morocco. The Project director is Prof. Chaker El Amrani, from the Faculty of Science and Technology in Tangier, Abdelmalek Essaadi University.

Summary

Air pollution is one of the major problems in the world. It has serious impacts on human health and environment. The World Health Organization (WHO) confirms that 92% of the world’s population are living in areas where air quality levels surpasses WHO limits, and that approximately 3 million deaths a year are due to exposure to air pollution.
Outdoor air pollution is the consequence of intensive industrial and farming activities, roads and maritime traffic and thermal power plants carbon emissions. Most harmful pollutants are Particulate Matter PM10 and PM2.5, Volatile Organic Compounds (VOC), Sulfur dioxide (SO2), Nitrogen oxides (NOX) and Carbon monoxide (CO). Exposure to high levels of emissions can cause serious diseases such as asthma, bronchitis, eye irritation and lung cancer. Within this context, there is a substantial need to implement early warning systems to monitor air quality in cities. The present project aims to contribute to this effort by implementing a workflow system, that is able to acquire environmental and pollution data from satellites and sensors on the ground, process and analyze them on High Performance Computing servers, apply Artificial intelligence algorithms predicting future pollution scenarios, and represent results on regional maps in real and near real-time.

People involved

  • Prof. Chaker El Amrani (Abdelmalek Essaadi University)
  • Prof. Mohammed Bouhorma (Abdelmalek Essaadi University)
  • Prof. Mohamed Ben Ahmed (Abdelmalek Essaadi University)
  • Prof. Abderrahman El Kharrim (Mohammed First University)
  • Prof. El Bouayadi Rachid (Mohammed First University)
  • Prof. Gilbert Rochon, Ph.D., MPH ( Tulane University, USA)
  • Prof. Tarek El-Ghazawi (The George Washington University, USA)
  • Prof. Siegfried Denys (University of Antwerp, Belgium)
  • Prof. Guadalupe Ortiz (University of Cadiz, Spain)
  • Miss. Meryeme Boumahdi (PhD student, Abdelmalek Essaadi University)
  • Mr. Mohamed Akram Zaytar (PhD student, Abdelmalek Essaadi University)
  • Mr. Badr-Eddine Boudriki Semlali (PhD student, Abdelmalek Essaadi University)
  • Mr. Ayoub Jadouli (PhD student, Abdelmalek Essaadi University)