Mapping of background air pollution at a fine spatial scale across the European Union.

Abstract

BACKGROUND: There is a need to understand much more about the geographic variation of air pollutants. This requires the ability to extrapolate from monitoring stations to unsampled locations. The aim was to assess methods to develop accurate and high resolution maps of background air pollution across the EU. METHODS: We compared the validity of ordinary kriging, universal kriging and regression mapping in developing EU-wide maps of air pollution on a 1x1 km resolution. Predictions were made for the year 2001 for nitrogen dioxide (NO(2)), fine particles