European exchange of monitoring information and state of the air quality in 2008 ETC/ACC Technical Paper 2010/1

02 Jun 2010

Iulian Petchesi

Summary
Current EU air quality legislation, Council Decision (97/101/EC), requires the European Commission to prepare yearly a technical report on the meta information and air quality data that have been exchanged among the EU Member States and the Commission. Besides, the member and collaborating countries of the European Environment Agency, which include EU (potential) candidate countries and EFTA states, have agreed to follow this reporting procedure as well. All this information is made available in the AIRBASE database, accessible at http://airbase.eionet.europa.eu. This technical report provides an overview of the reporting cycle on the data for 2008.

A total of 36 countries, including the 27 EU MS, have provided air quality data for 2008. As in preceding years, a large number of time series have been transmitted, covering, for example, sulphur dioxide (SO2), nitrogen dioxide (NO2), nitrogen oxides (NOx), particulate matter (PM10, PM2.5), ozone (O3), carbon monoxide (CO) and benzene (C6H6).
Increased submission took place on Volatile Organic Compounds (VOCs), Heavy Metals (HM's) and Polycyclic Aromatic Hydrocarbons (PAHs).
Nearly all the countries that updated their meta information used the Air Quality Data Exchange Module (AQ-DEM). This data transfer tool was made available specifically for this purpose by the ETC/ACC. Intensive feedback took place with the data suppliers on their submitted data.

This technical report not only describes the meta information and the quality of the measurement data but also the state of the air quality for some selected pollutants in 2008, including observed trends and exceedances of limit or target values.

Prepared by: WJA Mol, PR van Hooydonk and FAAM de Leeuw (ETC/ACC)

Published by: ETC/ACC, Bilthoven, NL, June 2010, 77 pp.

Downloads for separate table, graph and map files as included in the report