Starting in the 1990s, there has been a decline in emissions from the industrial sector, linked both to a reduction in production and to the filtering of emitted exhaust. Growing public awareness of the harmful effects of breathing polluted air, combined with tightening of air quality standards, should contribute to further reductions in emissions mainly from the municipal and transportation sectors. However, are we actually seeing improvements in air quality? Are there differences between pollutant concentrations in urban and suburban areas?

The seminar will focus on the results of the analysis of publicly available data on air quality from monitoring stations of the Chief Inspectorate of Environmental Protection in Warsaw and its surroundings. Air quality indices (PM, NOx, SOx, B(a)P) for seven measurement stations located in the city area (traffic station and urban background stations), as well as in suburban areas (one station in each geographic direction) will be discussed. The analysis considered the winter seasons (December-February) over the years of 2016-2023, with an analysis of meteorological conditions during the occurrences of bad and very bad air quality indices.

This work was partly done during the voluntary work of Dominika Szczepanik at Fire University and Karol Deptuła at the Institute of Geophysics.