Introducción del texto publicado por The European Topic Centre on Air and Climate Change:
Current air quality legislation of the European Union (EU), Council Decision (97/101/EC), requires the Commission to prepare yearly a technical report on the meta information and air quality data that have been exchanged among the Member States of the EU (EU MS) and the Commission. Besides the EU MS, other member and cooperating countries of the European Environment Agency, which include EU candidate countries, EU potential candidate countries and European Free Trade Association (EFTA) states, have agreed to follow this reporting procedure as well. The contents of AirBase (version 4) is available to the public via the European Environment Agency (EEA) website1. More information on AirBase can be found on the ETC/ACC website2. The results of the reporting cycle presented in this technical
report cover data for 2008.A total of 36 countries, including the 27 EU MS, have provided air quality data for 2008 . As in preceding years, a large number of time series have been transmitted, covering, for example, sulphur dioxide (SO2), nitrogen dioxide (NO2), nitrogen oxides (NOx), particulate matter (PM10, PM2.5), ozone (O3), carbon monoxide (CO) and benzene (C6H6). In an increasing degree also Volatile Organic Compounds (VOC), Heavy Metals (HM) and Polycyclic Aromatic Hydrocarbons (PAH) have been transmitted. Nearly all the countries that have updated their meta information have used the Air Quality Data Exchange Module (AQ-DEM), made available for this purpose by the European Topic Centre on Air and Climate Change (ETC/ACC).
This technical report not only describes the meta information and the quality of the measurement data but also the state of the air quality for some selected pollutants in 2008.