ETC HE Report 2023/3: Air quality maps of EEA member and cooperating countries for 2021. PM10, PM2.5, O3, NO2, NOx and BaP spatial estimates and their uncertainties.

This report presents air quality maps for the EEA member and cooperating countries (and three microstates) for 2021, as well as the relevant exposure estimates for health related and vegetation related indicators. It also summarizes exposure estimates in the period 2005-2021. The report provides and documents background materials (maps, exposure estimates) for the European Environment Agency’s Air Quality in Europe 2023 online report.

18 Jan 2024

Jan Horálek (CHMI), Leona Vlasáková (CHMI), Markéta Schreiberová (CHMI), Nina Benešová (CHMI), Philipp Schneider (NILU), Pavel Kurfürst (CHMI), Frédéric Tognet (INERIS), Jana Schovánková (CHMI), Ondřej Vlček (CHMI), Marta Garcia Vivanco (CIEMAT), Mark Theobald (CIEMAT), Victoria Gil (CIEMAT)

The report provides the annual update of the European air quality concentration maps and population exposure estimates for human health related indicators of pollutants PM10 (annual average, 90.4 percentile of daily means), PM2.5 (annual average), ozone (93.2 percentile of maximum daily 8-hour means, SOMO35, SOMO10), NO2 (annual average) and benzo(a)pyrene (annual average), and vegetation related ozone indicators (AOT40 for vegetation and for forests) for the year 2021. The report contains also maps of Phytotoxic ozone dose (POD) for selected crops (wheat, potato and tomato) and trees (spruce and beech) and NOx annual average map for 2021. The maps of POD for trees are presented for the first time in this regular mapping report. The trends in exposure estimates in the period 2005–2021 are summarized. The analysis for 2021 is based on the interpolation of the annual statistics of the 2021 observational data reported by the EEA member and cooperating countries and other voluntary reporting countries and stored in the Air Quality e-reporting database, complemented, when needed, with measurements from additional sources. The mapping method is the Regression – Interpolation – Merging Mapping (RIMM). It combines monitoring data, chemical transport model results and other supplementary data using linear regression model followed by kriging of its residuals (residual kriging). The paper presents the mapping results and gives an uncertainty analysis of the interpolated maps. It also presents concentration change in 2021 in comparison to the five-year average 2016-2020 using the difference maps.