European exchange of air quality monitoring meta information in 2003

Publication

Current air quality legislation of the European Union, Council Decision (97/101/EC), requires the Commission to prepare yearly a technical report on the meta information and air quality data flows that have been exchanged among the European Union Member States and the Commission. Besides the EU Member States, other Member States of the European Environment Agency, which includes EU Applicant Member Countries and EFTA states, and some EEA Candidate Member Countries have agreed to follow this reporting procedure as well. All this information is made available in the AIRBASE database. The results of the reporting cycle presented in this technical report cover data for 2003.

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 (AQ-DEM), made available for this purpose by the European Topic Centre on Air and Climate Change (ETC/ACC). A total of 32 countries, including 24 EU Member States, provided air quality data for 2003. Luxembourg is the only EU Member State not providing information. 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 2003 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.

Authors

Mol WJA , Hooydonk PR van

Specifications

Publication title
European exchange of air quality monitoring meta information in 2003
Publication date
1 September 2005
Publication type
Publication
Magazine
Bilthoven: European Topic Centre on Air and Climate Change ETC/ACC, 2005 (ETC/ACC Technical paper 2005/2)
Product number
91559