Summary

Page Last modified 20 Apr 2016

6 min read

Menu

Air pollution monitoring in Europe - Problems and trends

Summary

This report presents an overview of the air quality monitoring practice in Europe in recent years. The summary is based on information in questionnaires sent out in 1994 and returned by 24 countries, and other information from national and technical reports for some of those countries and for 6 other countries. Information was received from a total of 30 European countries, all 15 EU Member States inclusive. No information was available from Belarus, Bosnia-Herzegovina, FYROM, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, Moldova, the Russian Federation, Turkey, Ukraine, the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia.

Based upon monitoring requirements set in EU Directives, the "monitoring practice" is described in terms of coverage (compounds, spatial, temporal, site category), monitoring methods, data availability, data reporting and network/site description.

The information is presented at several levels of aggregation: countrywise network description tables (Appendix B), country summaries (Appendix A), European wide summary tables of monitoring practice (Chapter 3), a basis for the European scale summary description (Chapter 4).

It is acknowledged that the information collected is not complete in all respects for all countries. Only for some countries, comments to the first draft summaries were received (Austria, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Portugal, Sweden). The summaries are therefore presented with the reservation that the information may not be complete.

The coverage of air quality monitoring in Europe, in terms of time, space, compounds and site categories is substantial for most of the reporting countries. There are a total of close to 5,000 sites for urban/local monitoring and more than 750 sites for regional monitoring. Hot-spot sites (traffic, industry) is less well represented than are general urban background sites. In a number of countries, lead monitoring seems no longer to be well represented and in some countries ozone is not monitored. Ozone precursors are monitored at one or a few regional sites in 7 countries only.

From the information available for this report, the shortcomings or gaps in the coverage, in terms of complete mapping of areas of high concentrations and exceedances, cannot be judged in detail. Such an evaluation must be carried out by each state.

Table S1 gives the inventorized number of monitoring sites in each country, for various site categories of local and regional sites. Figures S.1 and S.2 shows total number of sites for local and regional monitoring in each country.

Table S.1: Spatial coverage, European AQ monitoring.

	LOCAL						REGIONAL
	No. of sites	No. of cities/towns	Site class distribution				No. of sites	SO2 +*	Dep.*	O3*
			UG*	UT*	Ul*	Rl*	1	1	1	0
Austria	165	10	100	30	20	15	55	55	35	55
Belgium	168	60	125		30	13	25
Denmark	18	3	7	8	3	0	17	6	17	3
Finland	120	30	71	18	28	3	22	8	7	9
France	875		875				21	17		21
Germany	467		232	156	79		74	658)		578)
Greece	31	11	22	2	7	0	1	1	1	0
Ireland	81	15	45	25	10	1	12	7		5
Italy	1293)	41	129				34)	3	3	2
Luxembourg	4	1	1	2	1	0	2	1	0	1
the Netherlands	20	9	7	13	0	0	36	30	14	26
Portugal	80	5	6	15	6	53	13	12	3	3
Spain	893		288	438	167		190			>7
Sweden	66	45	63	3			49	12	36	5
U.K.	515)	34	45	2		4	>38	38	32	15

Iceland	3	2	1	1	0	1	1	1
Liechtenstein	1	1	1	0	0	0
Norway	6	6	6	0	0	0	39	12	34	15

Albania	23	11	23
Bulgaria	100		100
Croatia	62	8	62				1	1	0	0
Cyprus	2	1	0	2	0	0	1	1	1	1
Czech Republic	6501)
Estonia	16	9	8	2	6		2	2	2	2
Hungary	39		39				2	2	2
Poland	>540	7)	>500		33		11
Romania	152		152				138	4	1372	4
Slovakia	37	17	14	6	10		7	7	7	4
Slovenia	86		86				4
Switzerland	986)		55	31	12		54
TOTAL	>4983						>818

UG - Urban general (in-city background) site
UT - Urban traffic site
UI - Urban industrial site
RI - Industrial site not in urban area
SO2+ - S and N compounds in air (gases and aerosol)
Dep - Precipitation chemistry
O3 - Ozone

1) Total for urban and regional. Site classification not known.
2) All stations measure pH, conductivity and acidity/alkalinity.14 sites measure major ions.
3) Not complete. 8) The number of sites may not be quite correct.
4) Only EMEP sites
5) Plus 1100 passive NO2 sampling sites
6) Plus 12 passive SO2 and 102 passive NO2 sites.
7) All cities with >20,000 inhabitants

Czech Republic: The number gives the sum of local and regional monitoring sites.

Figure S.1: Number of sites per country for the monitoring of urban/local/industrial air pollution.

Czech Republic: Sum of local and regional sites. Romania: Stations with only precipitation chem. (137) not included in the number.

Figure S.2: Number of sites per country for the monitoring of regional air pollution (incl. wet deposition).

International monitoring networks are also inventorized: ECE-EMEP, OSPAR, HELCOM, MEDPOL, GEMS/AIR, GAW, TOR, AMAP. Table S2 gives an overview of number and types of sites in these networks. Many stations operate under many of these networks simultaneously.

Table S.2: Summary of recent monitoring activities in Europe in international programmes.
For all programmes: Not all compounds are measured at all sites.

Programme	Sites	Countries	Compounds (summary)
EMEP (1995)	126	28	S- and N-compounds in air (gases and particles) and precipitation, and O3 and VOC in air.
OSPAR (1994) Precip. Aerosol/gas	25 12	10 6	Cd, Hg, NO3, NH4, (priority) As, Cr, Cu, Ni, Zn, organo-halogens (grey list) Cd, Hg, a-HCN, g-HCN, HNO3, NO3, NO2, NO, NH3, NH4 (priority) As, Cr, Cu, Ni, Pb, Zn (grey list)
HELCOM	31	8	N compounds in air (gases and particles), and in precipitation. Metals (Pb, Cd, Cu, Zn) in airborne particles and in precipitation. Cr, Ni, As, Hg in precipitation.
MEDPOL	13	10	Emphasis on heavy metals in aerosol, and heavy metals and major ions in precipitation.
GAW	61 100 42 16 14	23 29 19 5 10	Precipitation chemistry. "Trace gases": O3 (81), NOx (43), SO2 (34), CO2 (20), CH4 (7), N2O (3), CFCs (4). Aerosols Radiation Turbidity
TOR (1994)	29		O3, NO, NO2, NOy, CH4, CO, NMHC, JNO2, met.data.
AMAP	5*	5	Acid.dep., heavy metals, pesticides, PCBs, PAH
GEMS/AIR (1993/94)	9	9	SO2, SPM

* Only one site, Ny Ålesund at Spitzbergen, in Europe.

As a rule, monitoring data are in most countries not readily available to external users, soon after monitoring. From the available information, Austria, Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands, U.K., Norway and Cyprus make data from monitors available to external users in near-real-time. This list is probably not complete. In Germany near-real-time data are published on videotext (television) and/or screentext (T-online) several times a day.

Most countries from which we have specific information on this topic, have validated data available in their own data bases within 6 months after measurements. Thus, there should be no problem in principle in making the data available to the EEA within 6 months into the year after.

Reports containing data statistics, summaries, evaluations and assessments are available annually from most countries. Those reports present the air pollution data in various ways, and not always in accordance with the requirements of the EU Directives on parameters/statistics to be reported. This makes comparisons of air quality between countries in Europe problematic.

In many countries, the monitoring system is undergoing substantial modification (e.g. Austria) and extension (e.g. UK). There is a trend towards establishing national centres for on-line data collection (e.g. France, Norway).

Many countries reported the use of dispersion models as part of their air quality surveillance, e.g. Finland, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, UK. In Norway, the AirQUIS system being established in some cities provides the ability to model urban-scale air quality in near-real time.

lijn.gif (900 bytes)