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The Products
CITEAIR has developed the first Air Quality indices on the European level. An important feature of the indices is that they differentiate between traffic and city background conditions. The Common Air Quality Index (CAQI) is designed to present and compare air quality in near-real time on an hourly or daily basis. The CAQI has 5 levels, using a scale from 0 (very low) to >100 (very high) and the matching colours range from light green to dark red. The Year Average Common Air Quality Index (YACAQI) uses a different approach adopting the “difference to target” principle. If the index is higher than 1,0 it means that for one or more pollutants the limit values are not met. If the index is below 1 it means that on average the limit values are met. The project CITEAIR II will further develop the Air Quality Indices, to get an update please refer to www.citeaair.eu A full description of the indices is in the report Comparing Urban Air Quality Across Borders (36-page, 440-Kbyte PDF) Both indices are practically implemented on a Common Operational Webpage (COW). This interactive web service is accessible under www.airqualitynow.eu and provides an attractive platform to compare near-real time air quality in different cities in an easy understandable way. The website does not aim to replace local websites but to complement them in providing a common place and a common way of presenting air quality in an easy understandable and comparable way. When the project was finished 25 Cities and Regions link their real-time environmental data to this COW. Through this approach environmental data will be easily comparable across different sites in Europe. To join the COW just send a mail to join@airqualitynow.eu The project CITEAIR II will further develop the webservice. To get access to the latest developments please go to www.airqualitynow.eu and experience the COW! Public information on environmental issues is of increasing
importance and also an obligation under the EU Framework Directive on
air quality as well as under the Aarhus Convention. Reporting,
informing and communicating all deal with the production and
dissemination of information. They are closely linked but different in
nature and content. This report provides a strategy for
communicating with the public on Air Quality and delivers a wealth
of good practices and is made from practitioners for practitioners by
applying elements from communication theories. The guidebook Communicating Air Quality (124-page, 2.6-Mbyte PDF) is available. This guidebook comes up with a proposal for a common reporting format and a semi-automatic report generator for European cities. It is expected that this proposal leads to standardisation of air quality reports prepared by cities, makes reporting easier for a city and makes reports more comparable. The report
City Annual Air Quality Reports (84-page, 673-Kbyte PDF) is
available. The guidebook on air quality management is intended to assist cities in completing the diagnosis of their air quality problems and identifying a selection of tools and/or measures which could help reduce the problems and improve air quality in urban agglomerations. The examples used to illustrate a theme of urban air quality management are supplemented by case studies already implemented together with signposting or links to sources where other solutions have been reported. Please see the details in the report
Air
Quality Management (154-page, 7-Mbyte PDF) Transferring a Traffic-Environmental Modelling Chain Urban traffic and its resulting emissions are dominating the air
quality situation in most European agglomerations. In the context of
research projects funded by the European Commission innovative tools,
merging monitoring and simulation systems by means of Information- and
Communication Technologies have been developed and tested under
real-life conditions and forms a “toolkit” to support transferring
initiatives towards other European regions and cities. This guidebook
explains the transfer of experiences in developing a Decision
Support System (DSS) to assess the environmental impacts of urban
traffic in near-real time to a region in Italy. The final report Transferring a Traffic-Environmental Modelling Chain (171-page, 14.8-MByte PDF) is available.
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