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In this study, the Weather Research and Forecasting model with online coupled chemistry (WRF-Chem) is applied to simulate an intense Saharan dust outbreak event that took place over the Southern Italy in March 2016. The WRF model is found to reproduce well the synoptic meteorological conditions driving the dust outbreak: an omegalike pressure configuration associated with a weak cyclogenesis in the Iberian Peninsula. At the end of the simulated period the merging of two minima produce a large depression in the Peninsular Italy. The model performances in reproducing the atmospheric desert dust load is evaluated using a multi-platform observational dataset of aerosol and desert dust properties, including optical properties from satellite and ground-based sun-photometers, plus in-situ particulate matter mass concentration (PM) data. This comparison allows us to investigate the model ability in reproducing both the horizontal and the vertical displacement of the dust plume, and its evolution in time. The preliminary comparison with satellite (MODIS-AQUA) and sunphotometers (AERONET) showed that the model is able to reproduce well the horizontal field of the aerosol optical depth (AOD) and its evolution in time. The routinely measurements of ARPA-Puglia revealed the intense dust outbreak with peak PM10 value larger than 300 µg/m3 during march 23. On the other side, the model-measurements comparison for PM10 shows a good temporal matching. The model-to-measurements comparisons allows the evaluation and the tuning of physics-based emission scheme that is part of the WRF-Chem package release.

Densification is generally proposed as the solution to the excessive soil consumption that has characterized the urban development of European cities in the recent decades. Even if the “compact city” can generally be regarded as a preferred urban form over the “dispersed city”, the strategy of densification is not applicable to any context, leaving aside the local conditions. Densification operations should consider the state of the environmental and urban context and assess threats and opportunities offered by the specific site. Thus, this paper describes a method for the environmental sustainability analysis of the built urban fabric. It proposes a set of sustainability objectives and pre-conditions to be evaluated in order to estimate the possibility to increase the urban density without compromising the environment, and it defines implementation measures, declined for the various environmental aspects which are considered to be affected by the densification interventions (water, soil, energy, electromagnetism, seismic, public facilities, waste, mobility, noise, air). The implementation measures are considered as guidelines for the inclusion of new volumes or for the completion of existing ones into the built areas, to be codified in the municipal building rules in order to guarantee the sustainability of the densification. The theme is explored both at the building scale and the urban scale, considering both the environmental aspects dealing with the building, such as the energy and seismic improvement, the urban morphology and the infrastructures capacity at urban scale, such as transport and green networks, water and road traffic flows.