1 GIS Review of monitoring stations in AIRBASE: do monitoring stations wander ? Technical Workshop to support countries in further improving the quality of reporting on air quality Copenhagen 9-10 June 2005

2 Cecì n’est pas une pipe

3 A comment before you read the report for your country The reviews are not official quality checks They are an input to the workshop discussion on data quality The anomalies identified may be due to the external datasets and not to your meta data

4 Who did the review ? No resources at ETC ACC in 2005 work planning. Therefore we used an external contractor working on another EEA project. GIS experts but no knowledge of air quality legislation. EEA will take into account lessons learned from this experience.

5 Objective of the GIS review of AIRBASE stations Ad hoc exercise to provide information from external data sets to help countries check the accuracy of station location metdata currently held in AIRBASE. AirBase data were extracted by ETC ACC from AirBase in April 2005.

6 Extracted data: location & closely related information Station name Latitude Longitude Altitude Type of station Type of area City Nuts IV Network

7 Original idea... Only a few countries have NUTS4 information in AIRBASE We would provide countries with NUTS5 administrative area names derived from the coordinates for each station. But... EEA does not yet have access to the NUTS5 GIS data

8 Plan B: Organize an EEA kid’s zone competion – locate the AQ stations Not this time but maybe an idea for the future …….

9 Plan C: The current GIS review (1) We took a data set with administrative areas (Tele Atlas or ESRI in areas where there was no Tele Atlas coverage) We took a thematic data set with information which might help in checking the station type/station area classifications (Corine Land Cover)

10 Plan C: The current GIS review (2) For both data sets, we identified the polygons in which the AIRBASE station coordinates were located We highlighted some situations which might be anomalies The results are provided each country in the form of a report. The tables from the report are also provided as excel files for easier processing.

11 References for the external data sets used in the GIS review Tele Atlas Tele Atlas MultiNet TM Shapefile ESRI ESRI Data & Maps media kit. CLC Corine Land Cover 2000 by country. European Environment Agency Further information in EEA Technical report Corine land cover technical Guide – Addendum 2000,European Environment Agency

12 Types of anomaly and issues raised No coordinates Stations have been reported with (0,0) latitude and longitude coordinates. This results in the stations being located at same location in the Atlantic Ocean south of Western Africa Comma anomaly or mistyping Stations have a suspected comma anomaly which makes the longitude 10 fold bigger and locates the stations further west Missing negative value Station has been reported as having a positive longitude coordinate with the result that the station is located further east Network overlap Stations have coordinate overlap but are reported as being run by two different networks. One station is listed two times in AirBase but run by two different networks. This is possible. The following segnalations are usually related to the same situation Double EoI code One station is listed two times in the AirBase database. Coordinate overlap Stations have been reported having the same geographical location as other stations in terms of latitude and longitude coordinates but the stations have different EoI codes.

13 Types of flag and issues raised Inconsistent Tele Atlas City name compared to AirBase City name CLC Class Level 3 does not match AirBase Station Area Station falls outside country area Station falls in buffer zone But could be due to different character sets But could be due to the different level of resolution But could be due to station located on small offshore island

14 Examples Some random examples of the maps from country reports

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26 What next.. Where you find that this review has identified a real problem, please ensure that correct information is reported in Please consider whether you could build GIS checks into the quality procedures for your national AQ system. Any questions on this GIS review