The AURORAE (Air qUality foRecast fOR Arctic communitiEs) service

Air pollution represents the first environmental health problem in EU. The EU Action Plan: "Towards a Zero Pollution for Air, Water and Soil" provides a vision for 2025, including 2030 targets such as improving air quality to reduce the number of premature deaths. In this technical report we present AURORAE (Air qUality foRecast fOR Arctic communitiEs), an online dashboard providing accessible air pollution PM10 forecasts tailored for European Arctic communities of countries in the north Europe (Norway, Sweden, Finland, Denmark and Iceland) using a novel approach that involves the use of Artificial Intelligence algorithms. Our methodology consists in providing a 2-days air quality forecast tailored for about 100 monitoring stations distributed in North Europe and European Arctic. The forecast at the selected monitoring stations is released daily on the AURORAE website (https://aurorae.azurewebsites.net/) along with near-real time concentrations. This online forecast service may empower local communities and support decisions regarding pollution reduction and prevention. It might further improve the use of local air pollution observations by providing locally more accurate forecasts and bringing feedback information to models on their agreement with observations.