Importance of Air Quality Networks in Controlling Exposure to Air Pollution

An air quality monitoring network (AQMN) is a basic piece of environmental management due to that it satisfies the major role in monitoring of environment emissions, in special relevance to target air pollutants. An adequate installation would lead to support high efficiency of the network. Therefore, AQMN pre-layout should be considered as an essential factor in regarding with the location of fixed measurement stations within AQMN, as the minimum number of sampling points. Nevertheless, once AQMN has been already installed, and given that the spatial air pollutants pattern can vary along time, an assessment of the AQMN design would be addressed in order to identify the presence of potential redundant fixed monitoring stations. This approach would let to improve the AQMN performance, reduce maintenance costs of the network and consolidate the investment on those more efficient fixed stations. The chapter includes aspects relative to air pollutants measured by networks, their representativeness, limitations, importance, and the future needs. It ponders the need of re-assessment of the AQMN layout for assuring (i) a right evaluation of the human being exposure to atmospheric pollutants and controlling the environmental emissions into the atmosphere and (ii) an adequate performance of the network along time.