Mumbai: The BMC has issued a Letter of Intent (LOI) to the Indian Institute of Tropical Management (IITM) for setting up an air quality warning and integrated decision support system for emissions (AIRWISE).The civic body has been in talks with the IITM since last year for the system, which will help the civic body predict air-quality events in advance and avoid a severe air pollution events.According to BMC, the system will be similar to the one that IITM set up in Delhi. It is expected to provide precise information on the potential sources responsible for bad air quality while forecasting bad air-quality events. Information provided by the system will help the civic body monitor and control the emission sources leading to the bad air quality and enable them to make decisions to manage the deterioration in air quality.The services rendered by IITM will be for three years, and BMC is expected to spend Rs 3.6 crore on the system and services. The system will assimilate PM data from the various continuous ambient air quality monitoring stations of Maharashtra Pollution Control Board (MPCB), Safar, etc, located across Mumbai and from the 70 sensor-based monitoring systems that are proposed to be set up in the city, besides satellite-retrieved aerosol optical depth data.The system is likely to be initially with a horizontal grid spacing of 2 km, and generate forecasts 72 hours in advance and decision-support information, based on which short-term and long-term mitigation measures can be carried out by BMC.