Representativeness of air quality monitoring networks

The suitability of European networks to check compliance with air quality standards and to assess exposure of the population was investigated. An air quality model (URBIS) was applied to estimate and compare the spatial distribution of the concentration of nitrogen dioxide (NO2) in ambient air in four large cities. The concentrations calculated at the location of the monitoring stations, compared well with the concentrations measured at the stations indicating that the models worked well. Therefore the calculated concentration distributions were used as a proxy for the actual concentration distributions across the cities. The distributions of these proxy concentrations across the city populations was determined and cumulative population distribution curves were estimated. The calculated annual mean values at the monitoring network stations were located on the population distribution curves to estimate the fractions of the populations that the monitoring network stations represent. This macro scale procedure is used to evaluate which subgroups of the monitoring stations can be reliably used to decide on compliance or to estimate the concentration the population is exposed to. In addition, the CAR model and Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) models are used to investigate the effect of micro scale siting of the monitoring stations within the streets.