Www.airqualitynow.eu, a common website and air quality indices to compare cities across europe

Abstract : Air quality is a public concern. This is partly due to the "right to know" principle embodied in European legislation. Despite this common legislation, the way air quality is being interpreted and communicated differs considerably. For specialists raw monitoring data for Europe are available but these are not usable by the general public. Easy to understand and internationally comparable air quality information from one city to another is scarce: there are almost as many air quality indices as air quality monitoring networks. The CITEAIR II project (Common information to European Air, INTERREG IVc) facilitates the comparison of urban air quality in near real-time by introducing common air quality indices at hourly, daily and annual scales and by developing a forecast for those indices for D+0 and D+1.The implementation was based on a common website www.airqualitynow.eu using readily available simple IT-solutions. This paper describes those tools which both aimed at presenting the air quality of the participating cities in a comparable way and not to replace more targeted local information. Their added value is to provide, for the first time, a European and comparable picture of the air quality in near real-time easily accessible through a common platform and presentation of the results. The website is designed to receive and display data from any city wanting to join. The main part is dedicated to compare the cities index values using different time scales (hourly, daily or annual) and two types of exposure thanks to a background and a traffic index. In addition, space is offered to cities for presenting themselves according to a common template, providing background information on their specific air pollution situation and associated reduction measures. Participating is easy: cities upload their data through ftp and the indices calculations are automatically made. The website provides a dynamic picture of the air quality and is updated each hour enticing viewers to make repeated visits. However, participation with only a daily update or with yearly data is feasible as well