European exchange of air quality monitoring meta information in 2002 ETC/ACC Technical Paper 2004/1

31 Aug 2004

Iulian Petchesi

Summary
Current air quality legislation of the European Union, Council Decision (97/101/EC), requires the Commission to prepare a technical report on a yearly basis, combining the meta information and air quality data flows that have been exchanged among the European Union Member States) and shared with the Commission. Member States of the European Environment Agency, which includes EU Accession Candidate Countries, EU Acceding Countries, EFTA states, and Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and FYROM (Former Yugoslavian Republic of Macedonia), have agreed to follow this reporting procedure as well. All this information is to be made available in a database. The results of the reporting cycle presented in this particular technical report cover data for 2002.

The results of the reporting cycle presented in this particular report (7.9Mb PDF) cover data for 2001. This report contains information delivered by EU Member States, and EFTA states, and Switzerland and Accession Countries, who have agreed to follow the data exchange procedures.

Nearly all the countries that have updated their meta information used the Air Quality Data Exchange Module (DEM), made available for this purpose by the European Topic Centre on Air and Climate Change (ETC/ACC). A total of 30 countries, including 14 EU Member States, provided air quality data for 2002. As in preceding years, a large number of time series were transmitted, covering, for example, sulphur dioxide (SO2), nitrogen dioxide (NO2), particulate matter (PM10), ozone (O3), carbon monoxide (CO) and benzene (C6H6).

Although most countries provided 2002 data only, several did provide data from previous years. These were loaded into AIRBASE as well. AIRBASE contents are overviewed elsewhere in this report to help other Member States to identify and fill historical data gaps, as requested in Article 5(4) of the European Council Decision on Exchange of Information.

Prepared by: E Buijsman, PR van Hooydonk, WJA Mol, L Cernikovsky (ETC/ACC)

Published by: ETC/ACC, Bilthoven, NL, June 2004, 52 pp.