Combining models and measurements for European scale exceedance mapping

There is a need at the European policy and management level to have access to comprehensive assessments of air quality on the European scale. In support of this need the European Topic Centre for Air Quality and Climate Change carries out, on behalf of the European Environmental Agency, a range of European scale air quality mapping activities. In this paper statistical interpolation techniques have been applied to map and assess the rural background concentrations of PM10 and ozone on a daily basis over all of Europe. These daily maps are further used to determine exceedances of the air quality directive limit values for annual and daily mean PM10 as well as the percentile (26’th highest) 8 hour running mean for ozone.