Making Air Quality Assessments with AIRBASE

Abstract

The European Topic Centre for Air and Climate Change (ETC/ACC2) has developed AIRBASE, a database containing European-wide information on air quality monitoring stations and data. Air quality data for the 31 member countries of the European Environmental Agency (EEA) is collected under the Council Decision 97/101/EC (Exchange of Information). AIRBASE contains data for more than 40 pollutants at about 4300 stations over a period of more than 10 years. Besides the AIRBASE database, the AIRBASE information system consists of a Data Exchange Module which facilitates the exchange of information between the supplying countries and AIRBASE and an interactive graphical web-application AIRVIEW3 to provide an easy access to the data both for the general public as well as for the professional user. Last year AIRVIEW 3.1 is released. Some interesting new features of AIRVIEW will be presented. There are also XML-dumps available of AIRBASE. The national data suppliers are responsible for the quality of the data. Nevertheless, quality checks have been performed at the incoming data. AIRBASE has been used in a number of air quality assessments, both for the European Commission as well as for the EEA. Selected results - e.g. changing chemical composition - will be presented.