Meteorological simulations have been performed with two different mesoscale models: MM5 (PSU/NCAR-USA) and TAPM (CSIRO-Australia). Both models have been run under two different meteorological situations, typical for summertime and wintertime, allowing the models to be tested under different synoptic foreings. The study region for these mesoscale simulations is located in the interior of Catalonia, Spain, north of Barcelona, and can attain high pollution episodes despite not including important pollutant sources within the domain. Simulations have shown that the origin of the summertime pollution peaks in the region is the advection of air masses loaded with pollutants from the densely-populated region of Barcelona. Comparison of meteorological fields obtained with the two models have shown that, despite the much smaller computational resources needed by TAPM and being almost 10 times faster than MM5 in simulation time, both gave similar results, demonstrating thus the usefulness of TAPM as an alternative tool for air pollution management.