Bremen Particulate Matter

More than two million premature deaths each year are attributed to urban outdoor and indoor air pollution (World Health Report, 2002). It is therefore an urgent task to ascertain the surveillance of air quality parameters. Since the 1990s, a special attention is drawn to adverse respiratory effects caused by natural and anthropogenic airborne particulate matter, fine suspended and solid matter with a size in the range of nanometers and micrometers.
Recent studies showed that approximately 50.000 deaths in the U.S. (Mokdad, 2004) and 200.000 deaths each year in Europe (Pope, 2002) are caused only by the exposure to these fine airborne particles with diameters smaller than 10 micrometer, so called PM10.
Currently, all measurement data for the surveillance of particulate matter threshold alerts are provided by so called in-situ measurements. The operators of these gauging stations are national and federal institutions. The establishment and maintenance of air quality parameters is a complex and expensive task for each country.

above Germany from MERIS data

BREPAMA was suggested by the Institute of Environmental Physics (IUP), Bremen and is one of the first pilot projects proposed by the GMES Office Bremen. The processing chain uses the Bremen Aerosol Retrieval (BAER) developed at the IUP with novel modules. These algorithms provide particulate matter mass concentrations PM10 in a novel quality and with a high spatial resolution of 1 km, optionally 300 meters. The project sets up on recent successful sample validation results over whole Germany (s. Figure 1). Currently, data from the Medium Resolution Imaging Spectrometer Instrument (MERIS) on the Environmental Satellite (Envisat) are used for the retrievals.
It will make a substantial contribution to improve the availability of high qualitative, complementary and cost-efficient information on particulate matter concentrations. These are based on satellite measurements of high spatial resolution, what is indeed an innovative GMES service.
The retrieved particulate matter maps can be used for assimilation to improve and complement the current particulate matter measurements by ground based gauging stations; they will provide an objective and border-transcending monitoring of air quality in urban and rural European regions. BREPAMA aims to the development of a near-real-time operational particulate matter PM10 processing chain, in a first step based on satellite data over Germany with a focus on the Bremen area.

Literature

Mokdad, A. H., J. S. Marks, D. F. Stroup, and J. L. Gerding. Actual causes of death in the United States, J. Am. Stat. Ass., 291, 10, 1238-1245, 2004.
Pope, C. A., et al.: Lung cancer, cardiopulmonary mortality and long-term exposure to fine particulate air pollution, J. Amer. Med. Assoc., 287, 1132-1141, 2004.
von Hoyningen-Huene, W., A. Kokhanovsky, J. P. Burrows: Retrieval of particulate matter from MERIS observations, Proceedings of the 6th International Symposium on Advanced Environmental Monitoring, June 27-30, Heidelberg, Germany, 2006.
WHO, World Health Report: Reducing risks, promoting healthy life. Geneva, World Health Organisation 2002.