According to Article 6 and Article 8 of Air Pollution Control Act (APCA), newly installed or modified stationary pollution sources within Class 2 control regions or total quantity control zones in which pollutant emissions reach a certain scale shall be required to perform modelling and simulation for their pollutant emissions in order to verify that these emissions will not exceed allowable pollutant increase limits within the control region where the pollution source is located or within adjacent control regions where air quality might also be affected.
Air quality models (AQMs) are developed and established by experts from diverse scientific and technological fields. However, it is still necessary to standardize AQM selecting and processing procedures, related rules, and guidelines to convince everyone, when applying AQMs on the regulations, environmental impact assessments, and permits of stationary sources.
The AQM related resources are distributed across various academic and technical institutions in Taiwan, and result in repetitive construction, inconsistency, and information barriers in AQM. Integration of AQM resources is necessary. In addition, relevant materials are practically required and necessary for the execution of allowable incremental limit of APCA, the Department of Air Quality Protection & Noise Control started to support the establishment of the “Air Quality Models Support Center” and integrate relevant resources to provide consistent information for AQM applications. The "AQM Support Center " has been integrating experts and resources from academia, industry, and government since 2002, and becomes the decision-making support system. A lot of experience and achievements have been accumulated in protecting air quality in Taiwan. The whole picture of the AQM Support Center is as followed: