Possible contribution of satellite measurements to monitoring of air pollution in European cities and their surrounding areas for health services

Today there is broad agreement that population's health is significantly affected by influences from the polluted environment. Among the most tremendous consequences are allergies, skin cancer, and deseases of the respiratory tract. As a result of increasing frequence of such health problems health services started to initiate so-called environmental ambulances where patients get proper advice and treatment, especially in densely populated areas with severe air pollution problems. It turned out that the work of such ambulances can be strongly supported by delivering information on environmental conditions such as tropospheric ozone smog, aerosol particles and UV irradiance in near-real time. In such a way the medical staff is supplied with proper knowledge on the occurence of pollution events and their spatial distribution and detailed nature. The German Remote Sensing Data Center (DFD) receives data of different sensors on various satellite platforms and processes them into products of tropospheric ozone, the optical thickness and type of aerosol particles and UV intensity on 1-40 km grids. Satellite retrieved information itself can thus be a tool to monitor air quality and will directly be used by the environmental ambulance and other public health services. Furthermore, DFD extracts information about land use/land cover from its operational processing chains allowing the characterisation of ground pixels in terms of emissions of biogenic volatile organic compounds (BVOC) into the air. Air Pollution VIII, C.A. Brebbia, H. Power & J.W.S Longhurst (Editors) © 2000 WIT Press, www.witpress.com, ISBN 1-85312-822-8