Assessing the performance of air-pollution sources from ambient data

About the project

Ambient air-quality data are routinely collected across the UK, but are regularly under-utilised. Data tend to be used for the purpose of assessing numerical compliance of ambient air with UK/EU limit values, by calculating bulk statistics such as annual means and percentile values. However, the data could also be used for the purpose of assessing individual source contributions, estimating background levels of pollution and tracking the emissions performance of air-pollution sources.

The AirTrack project is working to develop techniques for analysing ambient air-quality data more effectively, and then disseminating those techniques to the user community. Our hope is that users of air-quality data will recognise the added value of these techniques and begin to adopt similar techniques in their own analyses. Some of the techniques we are developing are shown in a series of tabbed panels on our homepage.

We think that the best way to disseminate these techniques to the user community is to demonstrate them using a series of case studies involving real-life sources, data and management decisions. We explain a little more about how we choose these case studies here. You can also view case study summaries here.

We are very keen to hear from you if you have any thoughts or comments about our case studies, or about the project in general. Please contact us using our feedback form or by emailing us (contact details).

Last modified: 27/05/2010

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